#246
Over the past 36 hours, the wire services have been filled with hundreds of news releases on the current assessment of our readiness to handle a major disaster. This annual review, conducted by a non-partisan group in Washington D.C. called the Trust for America's Health, rates each state on a 10-point scale.
The headlines, of which these are a small sample, tell the story.
California called unready to handle bioattack
US health system unprepared, report says
Report: US still poorly prepared for health emergencies
Study: US Unprepared For Public Disaster
Report finds few states prepared for disaster
No state received a perfect score, however Kansas and Oklahoma received the highest scores, with nine out of the 10 indicators met. California, Iowa, Maryland and New Jersey are at the bottom, with scores of four out of 10.
States with low scores have begun issuing excuses, or statements finding fault with the study. Despite the looming threat of pandemic flu, and the up close and none-to-comfortable exposures to 9/11, Katrina and the anthrax scares of the past 5 years, some states have actually declined in their scores over the past 12 months.
If this is progress, I think I’ll pass.
We’ve known, basically for decades, that another pandemic would come someday. In 1976, the world breathed a sigh of relief when the Swine Flu threat fizzled. You’d have thought that we would have used this time, these 30 years of grace, to prepare.
But of course, we haven’t.
Another pandemic, although considered inevitable, was always thought of as something that would happen later, in the future. Not now. And certainly not on our watch.
While the signs of a looming pandemic are ominous and growing right now, no one can truly know if the H5N1 bird flu virus will make the mutational changes needed to become a pandemic. Perhaps we will get lucky again.
Given our state of readiness, we’d better hope that happens.
A reprieve, temporary though it might be, might buy us a few years to prepare. A few years to repair our public health infrastructure and to develop new antiviral medications and a universal influenza vaccine.
It would be expensive, and would require a national commitment. But it could be done. And it would save millions of lives.
I wish I had faith that if we were granted that time, that we’d use it wisely.
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