Is This Real World, Or Just An Exercise?

The Sydney Morning Herald :

Pandemic or a dress rehearsal?

Whether swine flu is the pandemic the world has been dreading should be known within the next few days.

Surely, they're not using the term 'dress rehearsal' as Webster's defines it?

"a practice exercise for something to come".

When Washing Your Hands Is Caving In To A Rudd Fear Campaign

By Darryl Mason

The Professional Idiot yesterday thought this is good advice to lessen the chance of becoming infected with the new ManBirdPig flu virus, or Influenza A H1N1 :

1: Don’t go to Mexico. Step 2: Wash your hands.

He thinks this is good advice, and it is, but it's NOT when Prime Minister Rudd thinks so :

...there is no fear so ill-founded that Kevin “Do Something” Rudd isn’t on hand to offer totally unnecessary advice designed to make you worry more, not less:

Wash your hands, PM says

Wash Your Hands = Totally Unnecessary Advice.

This whip-lashing about face by The Professional Idiot on simple hygiene took less than 12 hours. A brain scan may be needed.

Do you think The Professional Idiot told his family to stop washing their hands to prove that he's right and PM Rudd is a crazed fearmongerist?

Any doctor will tell you washing your hands regularly, a few times a day, will lessen your chances of becoming infected with ANY flu virus, and people should be reminded of that simple fact at the start of every flu season, not just when the World Health Organisation raises its pandemic alert to threat level 5 out of 6.

This incomprehensible fuckwit is leading his more gullible readers down a very, very dangerous path of anti-Rudd irrationality.

UPDATE : A prediction from The Professional Idiot, for the ages :

Australians are more likely to be eaten by mice than to die of swine flu.

That sound you hear is thousands of pandemic-briefed health professionals laughing, in horror.

To Stockpile Or Not To Stockpile

By Darryl Mason

A "run on the shops" to stock up on enough food and water to last your household for two weeks of voluntary home isolation is exactly what's needed to pump those $900 bonuses straight back into the economy :

The Federal Government's pandemic plan, a 132-page manual issued to medics, media and the public, insists that once the world reaches phase five, Australians should stock their pantries with food and bottled water to last 14 days, check on elderly neighbours and put emergency numbers by the phone.

But yesterday a spokesman for the Department of Health and Ageing called for calm, saying the Government did not want to spark panic buying - ignoring its own plan, already issued to hospitals across the nation.

"I agree that is it confusing," the spokesman said, admitting he had not read the pandemic plan despite being employed to answer questions about it from national media. "The manual may say people should be preparing but we don't want a run at the shops," he said.

It doesn't matter what the government wants. The people will do whatever they think they have to do to ensure their loved ones are going to get through whatever is coming next.

Woolworth's getting emptied in a weekend of fevered stockpile shopping is the least of their problems if an influenza pandemic is on the verge of being declared (if it hasn't already inside the government).

The pandemic response plans made back in 2005 and 2006 were deadly serious, very detailed. Most didn't read them. It's not too late to get some of the highlights of how prepared you are expected to be for something most didn't even know was coming this time last Friday morning :

Residents are advised to stock their pantries with drinks, including three litres of water for each person each day, dried and long-life food such as canned meals, toilet paper, batteries, candles, matches, manual can openers and water sterilising tablets. Analgesics, masks, gloves, a thermometer, disinfectant and prescription medications should also be stockpiled and people should have enough supplies to stay in their homes for 14 days.

Householders should also have plenty of tissues, alcohol-based hand-wash dispensers in kitchens and bathrooms, and soap and disposable towels near all sinks, the manual says.

14 days.

And three litres a water a day is the minimum you need per day, it doesn't include water for washing clothes, or bathing.

If you had to take the family off to a central coast holiday house for two weeks, and the house had nothing but the kitchen basics, what would you take with you if you thought you wouldn't be able to get to the shops? And the place might run out of running water? And electricity?

Here's a story from 2006 detailing just how extensively Australian businesses were preparing back then for an influenza pandemic. The public fear then was of a bird flu pandemic, but Australian and American government response plans were always for the "inevitable" influenza pandemic, not a pandemic of just one type of influenza :

Mounting fears of an avian flu outbreak amongst humans has caused Australian businesses to stockpile anti-viral drugs and face masks and make definitive plans for how they will continue to operate when almost half of their workers may be off work, either ill or looking after someone who is.

Pandemic risk committees already exist within major companies such as Bluescope Steel and Telstra while the Commonwealth Bank has appointed a pandemic planning project manager.

Expanded computer networks to enable staff to work from home in the event of an outbreak have been included in the preparations against bird flu.

Through its relationship with medical support agency International SOS, BHP Billiton, has stockpiles of anti-viral drugs in regional offices considered at high risk.

The Bank of Queensland has proposed to implement basic hygiene education for staff. According to immunologists this measure would help to reduce the spread of disease if a pandemic develops.

Businesses have been advised to plan for up to half their staff being absent due to illness, or caring for sick family members or children because of school being closed.

As immunologist Ron Penny said," There's no strong recommendation that people who have a seriously infectious disease should stay at home. I think we need to educate people".

Federal Government advisers have warn that economically, Queensland would be the hardest hit of any Australian state with even a modest level pandemic causing a loss of about $11 billion, off the Gross State Product (GSP) in the first year alone.

According to Telstra's network services managing director Michael Lawrey preparations for the likelihood of a pandemic were slightly higher in intensity than planning for other business risks such as fires, cyclones and floods.

Don't worry, Australia's biggest businesses are well prepared if the World Health Organisation raises its pandemic threat level to 6 (its highest) over the weekend, or if the Rudd government officially announces we may all have to think about taking a 10 day long 'home-cation" sometime soon.

But how prepared are you?

Just in case.


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Err....Yessss...I Too Am An Essential Worker, Really I Am

Hopefully, Health Minister Nicola Roxon is right :

"...we have 8.7 million courses of these antivirals in our stockpile."

And this news report is wrong :

Australia has stockpiled 8.7 million doses of the Tamiflu and Relenza drugs, which are believed to be effective in treating the virus.

This one, too :

...the Government has a stockpile of nearly 9 million doses to be used in the event of threatened epidemic.

The confusion over Doses and Courses is widespread in the Australian media.

Anti-virals are only as effective as they can be if a course of them is taken, a series of doses. Catching the New Flu and taking one or two Tamiflus or Relenzas is not expected to make much difference.

During a pandemic, the government's plan is to make sure doctors, nurses, hospital staff, ambulance drivers, body collectors, firefighters, some police, essential government and infrastructure workers get the anti-virals they need to keep doing their work surrounded by, and coming in regular contact, with a killer virus.

9 million doses of anti-virals is fuck all for 21 million Australians, if a course is six to twelve doses, with "essential workers" likely needing at least few courses over the many months it would take for a pandemic, or pandemic waves, to unfold.

9 million courses, however, will allow hundreds of thousands of workers to continue doing their jobs, while the rest of the population, for varying amounts of time, are confined to their homes, either voluntarily or under police order.

If there is a pandemic.

There will be anti-viral courses left over for some of the sick, and the ramped up production of anti-virals in Australia now (300 new jobs!) will reach government distribution points in a month or two. But, if 30 to 40% of the Australian population falls ill, over six months to a year or more of pandemic waves (as some experts are now predicting), the anti-viral production output in Australia will not satisfy demand.

If a pandemic becomes reality sooner rather than later, there will be extemely hard choices that will have to be made about whether people more likely to die from the virus, even if they have treatment, should be given a course of drugs that are in limited supply.

It's a surreal reality we might on the verge of being plunged into....

If a pandemic happens.

If.

But a couple of weeks worth of food and water stockpiled in the home, just in case, and to be on the safe side, shouldn't be left to the last minute.

Like the YK2 episode, you can eventually get through all those extra cans of soup and bags of rice crowdiing up the spare room later on if nothing happens, or donate it to charity.

The QLD Government's 'Pandemic Planning In The Workplace' Guide

September 2005 : Then Health Minister Tony Abbott On Influenza Pandemic In Australia - Die In Your Homes

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