Going out not with a bang, but with a cough

Here where the Bush Administration's "strong leadership" in disaster preparedness as it pertains to bird flu has gotten us so far:

U.S. experts expect to be overwhelmed by bird flu
02 Feb 2006 22:53:15 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - U.S. flu experts are resigned to being overwhelmed by an avian flu pandemic, saying hospitals, schools, businesses and the general public are nowhere near ready to cope.

Money, equipment and staff are lacking and few states have even the most basic plans in place for dealing with an epidemic of any disease, let alone the possibly imminent pandemic of H5N1 avian influenza, they told a meeting on Thursday.

While a federal plan has been out for several weeks, it lacks essential details such as guidance on when hospitals should start to turn away all but the sickest patients and when schools should close, the experts complained.

"There is no way at this time that we can even plan for this epidemic," said Dr. Roger Baxter of the University of California San Francisco and associate director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center.

"We could be easily overwhelmed," Baxter told the meeting organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"A lot of our facilities are old, with no isolation facilities," Baxter said.

[snip]

Dr. Trish Perl, president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and director for infection control at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore said she did a quick estimate of how many masks, for instance, a hospital would need to get through a pandemic outbreak.

A protective face mask is standard equipment for use in caring for patients with respiratory disease such as flu.

A 600-bed hospital would need 1.6 million masks to get through six weeks -- and that is assuming the hospital eases up on rules requiring workers to wear a fresh mask at each encounter with each patient, Perl said.

So what have the wingnuts got their panties in a twist about? Gay marriage, and frothing at the mouth about the Oscar-nominated films.