Huffington Post: America's RNs call for much broader response to swine flu

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-burger/americas-rns-call-for-muc_b_192963.html

After years of shredding our public health infrastructure and ill-advised minimal preparations for the next great global pandemic, the spreading swine flu threat is at last making clear the very real calamity that could be just around the corner. If not today, surely from the next epidemic.

The Obama administration's call on Congress Tuesday to allocate $1.5 billion for combating the virus is a start, but only a start. The RNs of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) believe that far more is needed in federal action, in regulatory crackdown on insurance practices that potentially inhibit those who are infected from seeking help, and in global coordination.

From SARS to avian flu to the swine influenza, the only question has not been if, but when.

Three years ago, during the advent of an avian flu outbreak, in an article by Conn Hallinan and Carl Bloice in the national magazine of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, we warned that the "firewalls for stopping the next great pandemic are getting thinner."

If the swine flu or the next pandemic has only the fatality of the 1918-1919 global influenza pandemic -- 2.7 percent -- it would have a catastrophic effect. That pandemic killed 675,000 Americans and anywhere from 50 to 100 million people at a time when the world's population was less than a third what it is today, and when populations were far more isolated.

Obviously, there have been medical advances in the past 90 years. But on many other levels, conditions remain as precarious as ever.

FULL story at link.

sanitation, and social distancing mechanisms. There isn't enough Tamiflu in the world, or enough hospital staff and beds, to treat everyone if it gets too widespread. We need to remember the BASICS and not count on technology to save us, because if this thing heads south, it simply can't.

This is our dress rehearsal right now. Something bigger and worse will come down the pike some day, and we'd best be ready.