preparedness
lborkowski | December 28, 2016The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on July 8, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Kim Krisberg
In 2005, the World Health Assembly adopted a revised version of its International Health Regulations, a legally binding treaty among 196 nations to boost global health security and strengthen the world’s capacity to confront serious disease threats such as Ebola and SARS. A decade later, just one-third of countries have the ability to respond to a public health emergency. That’s why Rebecca Katz thinks it’s time to get creative.
“How can we…
lborkowski | May 26, 2016Last week, the World Health Organization stopped short of declaring a yellow fever outbreak centered in Angola to be a public health emergency of international concern, but its emergency advisory committee “emphasized the serious national and international risks posed by urban yellow fever outbreaks.” Angola has reported more than 2,000 suspected cases of the disease and nearly 300 deaths. Cases among travelers from Angola have also been reported in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya.
Like Zika, yellow fever is a flavivirus spread by Aedes mosquitos. Typical symptoms include…
oracknows | September 18, 2014
This one will be much shorter than usual, mainly because I was out late last night for a dinner function at which I was on a panel of breast cancer experts. I must admit, even after having been an attending surgeon for 15 years, it never ceases to make me feel a bit weird to be presented as a “breast cancer expert”—or an expert at anything, for that matter. It’s rather like how I sometimes feel a bit weird that skeptic groups still invite me to give talks. Ten years ago, I sucked at public speaking. Now I’m apparently good enough that people want to hear me. Go figure.
In any event, I hate…
kkrisberg | May 23, 2014Despite our best preparedness efforts, a real-life flu pandemic would require some difficult and uncomfortable decisions. And perhaps the most uncomfortable will be deciding who among us gets priority access to our limited health care resources. How do we decide whose life is worth saving?
There are so many different ways to view such a scenario; so many different values and ethical dilemmas to consider. In the chaos of a pandemic, life-saving allocation decisions would not only impact the patient in question — the repercussions would likely ripple throughout families and entire communities.…
lborkowski | May 7, 2014Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is a viral respiratory illness characterized by fever, cough, and shortness of breath, and it has been fatal in 30% of the cases identified since the disease was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. It is caused by a coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and has been shown to spread between humans by close contact; new research suggests the virus may also be transmitted to humans from camels. Cases have been identified in multiple countries in the Arabian Peninsula, and a spike in cases in April -- more than 200 in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that…
lborkowski | April 16, 2014The list of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners announced earlier this week includes several journalists whose award-winning work addresses public health issues.
The Boston Globe Staff won the Breaking News prize for “exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.” Among the many articles in the Globe’s extensive coverage of the April 15, 2013 attack and its aftermath are pieces on the first responders, hospital workers, and therapists who…
lborkowski | April 18, 2013The New Yorker's News Desk blog features an excellent piece by Atul Gawande called "Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready." It's a riveting read about how emergency medical teams, the city's emergency command center, and hospital staff all responded immediately and with admirable coordination to the needs of those injured in the bomb blast at the Boston Marathon:
The explosions took place at 2:50 P.M., twelve seconds apart. Medical personnel manning the runners’ first-aid tent swiftly converted it into a mass-casualty triage unit. Emergency medical teams mobilized en masse from around the city,…
lborkowski | March 12, 2013On March 12, 2003, the World Health Organization issued a global health alert for an atypical pneumonia that was soon dubbed SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. The coronavirus had a high fatality rate; it emerged in China's Guangdong province and within a month affected 8,000 patients, killing 774 of them in 26 countries. Toronto was one of the cities hit hard by the disease, and ace health reporter Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press has written several pieces on ten-year anniversary of the outbreak.
In "A decade ago, SARS raced round the world; Where is it now? Will it return?"…
sastyk | February 7, 2013Are we facing Snowpocalypse this weekend? Rest assured, your blogiste is ready. Ok, sorta ready, since I'm working on my book I have to rely on husband, Phil-the-housemate and children to move a buttload of wood inside, and we do have to pick up more baby formula, but otherwise, we're ready to hunker down here and toast marshmallows while the world undergoes...what exactly?
Current forecasts place the total amount somewhere between 2.6 and 29.3 inches.
Such is the maddening, exhilarating unpredictability of weather patterns on this rock-and-lava spinning blueberry we call home.
...The third…
sastyk | January 3, 2013Since 2006, I've been making annual predictions about what would happen in the coming year, and well, this year, I didn't. Part of it was because I spent a week travelling and had limited time and internet access, but if I'd really wanted to, I could have made it happen. The project of prediction, however, has come to make me a little queasy, particularly watching the degree of anxiety brought up for some people by empty-headed projections like the Mayan apocalypse.
I've always prefaced any predictions that I make with the fact that you should remember what you are paying for my opinion and…
sastyk | December 21, 2012After recent events, I received a request to repost my security, safety and weapons. I won't post the whole thing, but I wanted to include the rant that I ALWAYS preface any discussion of guns with in my classes, my book and on my blogs.
I am not anti-gun. They are a useful tool in my trade, mostly used to put down dying and suffering animals. I approve of hunting of overpopulated animals, although I don't hunt myself (grew up around it, though, and ate my share of Brunswick stew with squirrel in it). I think in some hands, particularly those of older women in dangerous urban areas, guns…
sastyk | December 7, 2012I usually allow my honorary older brother, John Michael Greer to debunk the idea of the apocalypse, Mayan and otherwise. He's even written a (very funny and, as usual, brilliant) book about it, and he's the master of historical examples in which everyone was pretty sure the world was going to end and it didn't. While I tend to think that we are closer to a collapse (a word I use in its technical sense, meaning big step down in complexity and function) than most people admit, I am very far from thinking that this will be the end of the world, a term that I think is largely meaningless unless…
sastyk | November 1, 2012I was in Boston this weekend visiting my sister, so didn't have a chance to reprise my Irene prep post or any of the other approximately two billion (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration) posts I've made over the years about how to prepare for a natural disaster, but I'm still getting emails from people in the dark or by the water talking about how their preps fared, and how they are doing. It is one of the most rewarding things about what I do - hearing that others are warm, fed and safe in part because they took my advice. For us, it was a matter of putting our preps into place and then…
sastyk | September 6, 2012End of summer is a really good time to sit down and look at your preparations and your food storage and take inventory. What have you put by? What do you still need more of? What did you use over the last year? What did you have too much of? Whither from here? September is National Emergency Preparedness month, so now is the time to think - am I ready for the next crisis (do you even have to ask whether there will be one?)
If you’ve been working on this, but you don’t feel you are ready, here are some questions to ask yourself, and some possible remedies if things aren't where you want…
lborkowski | June 13, 2012Last week, the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response and Administration held a hearing on the National Preparedness Report released earlier this year by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Subcommittee Chair Gus Bilirakis noted in his opening remarks that it’s the start of hurricane season, and cited the response to Hurricane Irene and the Joplin tornado as evidence that preparedness in the US has improved since the days of September 11, 2011 and Hurricane Katrina.
The first witness was FEMA Deputy Administrator…
sastyk | March 8, 2012Well, I guess I timed that last piece reasonably well ;-), no? As you may have noticed, I am at present typing this on the internet, rather than carving it into a stone tablet (actually I'd probably just use a pen and a piece of paper, but stone tablet does sound more apocalyptic), so the latest solar storm wasn't a big deal. Still, it does seem like because there are so many fun things that could take out electricity for an extended period - let's call it widespread outages for months, anyway - that it does seem to be worth talking about. So let's talk.
What do you imagine such an outage…
sastyk | March 6, 2012Quite a few years ago I wrote a piece arguing that the single most likely scenario for most of us having to deal with long term electrical shortages doesn't involve gridcrash scenarios, but the growth of poverty and utility shut offs. I suggested that people should be prepared to deal with electrical outages in large part simply because of the economic consequences of our situation. It isn't that I didn't believe anything could shut down the electric grid, I simply felt that realistically, the probabilities of more than short-term outages in the near term were pretty small.
In news that…
lborkowski | January 19, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It only takes a few minutes of talking with Scott Becker to realize just how passionate he is about public health. In fact, his enthusiasm is contagious. Maybe that's why he isn't mincing his words.
"What keeps me up at night is how we are going to maintain the core and critical services we have," said Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "If the question is 'how low can we go?' My answer is 'we're there.' I used to be on a more hopeful note, but I can't do that anymore."
Becker is talking about the worrisome state of public health…
sastyk | August 30, 2011So we made it through. Let me just note, however, that anyone who says that Irene was a wimpy storm that didn't do much damage shoulda been here. We're safe, but it was a near thing.
We had close to 9 inches of rain and wind gusts that I'd estimate above 60mph - they took down two big locust trees and several willows. One of the locusts came down 10 feet from the buck barn where the buck goats and the calves were, another 10 feet from the rear of the house, while my kids were sitting in the room reading. Our enormous beech tree was entirely surrounded by the rushing creek (it is normally…