Epidemics
World news organizations are reporting an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza on a turkey farm in Britain. The European Union, which does government well, has rules in place for dealing with this sort of thing. As a result, Britain has set up a two-mile protection zone around the farm and a surveillance zone of about 7 miles. The authorities will slaughter as many of the turkeys as is necessary to contain the outbreak.
And well they should. Even with a world that now understands the catastrophe that could result from a worldwide flu pandemic like the one in 1918-19, which killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, H5N1 is known to have infected 270 humans and killed 60 percent of them. Few other contagious diseases that residents of modern, industrialized nations have any risk of catching are that deadly.
Pennsylvania, or rather Philadelphia, was an epicenter of the 1918 pandemic (a pandemic is an epidemic that affects an entire country, or the world) largely because of troop movements because of the war. I've been reading John M. Barry's excellent book, The Great Influenza. He says the initial outbreak of deadly influenza most likely occurred in Kansas and spread outward to the world from there, again because of troop movements. The pandemic ultimately killed 650,000 Americans, but perhaps 100 million worldwide.
But the real value of Barry's book is to show how unprepared American local health authorities were for a fast-moving flu pandemic which often had a person dead by sundown who was perfectly healthy when the sun rose that day. More than 4,500 people died in one week in Philadelphia alone. No one was available to bury the dead. Even an offer by the city prison to have inmates do it had to be rescinded because too few guards were healthy enough to supervise them. People died in horrible pain, and Barry says the manner of death scared people as much as death itself.
Dealing with both the threat of the H5N1 flu virus and an actual outbreak requires strong, competent, well-funded government at all levels, but most especially at the Federal level. The thought of George W. Bush being President during a pandemic is amost as scary as the disease itself. Imagine the utter incompetence of his Hurricane Katrina response in New Orleans expanded to the the entire country when people are dying in droves. If the pandemic comes, we can only hope it is after the next President takes office in 2009.