Current News |
Workshop on Preparing for
Calamities Focuses on the Flu
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: June 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/
Be afraid, be very afraid. There is no
telling what the next disaster will be.
Another terrorist attack? A steam pipe
explosion like the one that shut down
several blocks of Lexington Avenue a
year ago? Or perhaps a pandemic flu that
would cripple New York City’s economy by
making people afraid to go to work or
ride on subways and buses?
That was the message at a daylong
workshop conducted on Tuesday by the
city’s health and emergency management
agencies, intended to give businesses
tips on how to cope with the potential
calamities.
The workshop had all the portentous,
overwrought atmosphere of movies about
how the world is coming to an end and
everyone had better be ready, from “War
of the Worlds” to the latest M. Night
Shyamalan film. Only in this faux
disaster, the participants — some of
whom have spent years immersing
themselves in the subject — were
treating it with deadly earnestness.
The possibility of an influenza pandemic
was the disaster du jour. Dr. Isaac B.
Weisfuse, the city’s deputy health
commissioner for disease control, told
an audience of about 300 business people
that since history repeats itself, he
considers it likely that there will be a
worldwide outbreak of flu, possibly a
mutation of the current avian flu,
sometime in the 21st century, just as
there were killer disease epidemics in
virtually every other century.
“Everybody in the whole state — local
governments, businesses large and small,
families — should be preparing,” Dr.
Weisfuse told the gathering at New York
University.
Just as Americans built bomb shelters
and stocked them with crackers during
the Cold War, the city has been
stockpiling supplies to combat pandemic
flu, Dr. Weisfuse assured his audience.
He announced that 25 million surgical
face masks — known as P.P.E.’s, short
for “personal protective equipment” —
are secreted in a New York City
warehouse.
“I’m very proud of this collection,” Dr.
Weisfuse said, showing a slide of the
rows upon rows of boxed-up masks, like
the treasure in an Indiana Jones movie.
“We have more face masks than you could
ever imagine.”
But, still not enough. The stockpile is
equal to three for each of the city’s
eight million residents, and
epidemiologists recommend changing those
face masks twice a day. “Look at all
these lovely boxes,” Dr. Weisfuse said.
“They’re going to be empty after about a
day and a half of pandemic.”
(One audience member, who said he
managed a 42-story residential
high-rise, wondered how many microns of
particle size the mask should be able to
guard against. Dr. Weisfuse replied, in
essence, that it does not mater, because
the masks are so loose that some germs
are bound to escape from the sides.)
In an indication of how hot the topic
is, a competing workshop on preparing
employers for pandemic flu has been
scheduled for Thursday at the Javits
Convention Center, sponsored by, among
others, Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, an
antiviral treatment used to treat and
prevent seasonal flu.
At Tuesday’s session, city officials
said they were thinking far beyond the
common flu. The city has access to
enough antiviral medications to give
more than two million people a five-day
course of treatment, a supply based on
the expectation that a pandemic flu
would attack about 25 percent of the
population, Dr. Weisfuse said. It is up
to individual businesses to decide
whether to stockpile their own antiviral
medications, and they run the risk of
having to replace them at the end of
their current five-year shelf life.
There are also legal and ethical
implications in determining who should
get the medication if there is not
enough, he said. (The government has
posted some guidelines for distributing
medication, with national security
workers, health care workers, emergency
services workers, drug manufacturers,
elected officials and infrastructure
workers ranking high on the list.)
The federal government has 20 million to
30 million prepared doses of vaccine, he
said, which would probably be reserved
for health care workers and the
military.
But Dr. Weisfuse noted that this
stockpile was based on the existing
strain of avian flu, H5N1, which is not
easily transmitted from person to
person, and said the real threat would
come from a mutation in the existing
strain.
“We don’t know if the prepared
vaccination is going to be very useful,”
he said, noting that flu germs have been
adept at developing drug resistance. “It
may be that we’re kind of all up the
creek, because we have no treatment
regimens that would be effective.”
Controlling a pandemic and keeping a
city running at the same time is a
delicate balancing act: how to keep mass
transit running so people can get to
work, while advising people to stay out
of crowds, where flu can spread by
coughing?
“We know people are more likely to
walk,” Dr. Weisfuse said, “which, quite
frankly, wouldn’t be a bad thing, for
obesity, exercise.”
The city’s quintessential urbanness
could be its silver lining.
“One of the beauties of living in New
York City is that we have no big poultry
production farms,” like, say,
Pennsylvania, Dr. Weisfuse said, with a
hint of glee.
But the city does have live poultry
markets, and city officials are making
plans to cull diseased birds from those
markets. In any case, Dr. Weisfuse
dismissed that problem as “small
potatoes.”
So, someone in the audience asked, what
are the chances?
“Let’s look at history,” Dr. Weisfuse
replied, and then he ticked it off:
pandemics in 1968, 1957 and 1918 (the
worst, in which an estimated 30 million
to 50 million people died).
“By that criterion,” he said, “we’re
kind of due.” |
|
|
|