This week the federal government released a report card on U.S. preparedness for a bird flu pandemic. The report comes just over a year after the government issued their National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan. The new report stresses that although most of the original plan has already been put into place, areas of weakness include a limited capacity to detect an outbreak, and the possibility that hospitals would be overwhelmed by the large number of persons who might become infected.
The report also notes that media attention to bird flu seems to have died down. And yet, almost as many people have died of the disease in 2007 as in each of the previous two years. Do we just have short attention spans?
The complete report can be accessed at www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/pandemic-influenza-oneyear.html.
