Germ Warfare

An influenza pandemic remains the worst-case scenario, but each year seasonal influenza takes a toll of its own. Though flu-related deaths among adults aren’t reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, pediatric deaths reported nationally paint a grim picture of seasonal influenza. Across the country, 153 children died of flu-associated deaths during the 2003-04 flu season. During last year’s season, which the CDC described as “generally mild,” sixty-eight children died.

“Influenza is one of the leading causes of death, year in and year out,” says Ferguson. But getting that message out can be a challenge, even in a media-saturated culture such as ours. Go too far while telling the public the human toll a severe flu season—or, worse, a full-scale pandemic—could take and you “scare people into denial,” Ferguson continues. Beat the drum too often and the public becomes bored, an effect dubbed “flu fatigue.” Tell the public how quickly our world would change in the event of a pandemic (businesses closed, flights grounded, students and workers sent home in an effort to break the chain of exposure) and you face ridicule and resistance in a post-9/11 world grown weary of alerts and official advice to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting.

McClure says the idea of planning for emergencies is a foreign concept to most of us, who have never even had to stock up for a winter storm. “It’s very counterintuitive for us to think we have to put anything aside because we can go anywhere and get anything we want, at any time,” she says. “We don’t even have seasonal vegetables anymore. But I try to remind people that all of that stuff in front of us is supported by a very thin supply chain that can be interrupted.

“If you haven’t experienced [a public health emergency],” McClure says, “it’s very difficult to believe it can happen.” But it will happen, she insists. “It isn’t a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

When a pandemic does happen, I’m going to need a lot of dog food.
That was one of the discoveries I made recently, after creating an emergency-planning kit as prescribed by codeready.org, the emergency preparedness website created by the state departments of public health and public safety. The goal of the codeReady campaign, which the state rolled out last spring, is to get Minnesotans to plan for a pandemic or other emergency that would require them to stay home for extended periods of time or otherwise strain the official emergency response. So far, more than 57,000 individual visitors have gone to the site, and nearly 11,000 say they’ve created an emergency kit as I did, starting with a comprehensive shopping list of items a family would need in a worst-case situation.

When I went to the site to figure out what a one-week preparedness plan would look like, I expected instructions for turning my basement into a bunker. But the suggestions seemed surprisingly reasonable. For instance, my family of five would need 137 servings of protein, which seemed excessive until I learned I could cover that with a few pounds of dry beans, two jars of peanut butter, and the tuna fish I had left over from last year’s flu season. The thirty-five gallons of water the site says we’d need seemed more daunting.

“I say do what you can do,” Elizabeth McClure says. “If it gets you off zero, that’s a start.”