James Unland, Executive Editor Interviews With Experts Relating to Flu Pandemic Risk        Get  RSS Feed

Selected Relevant News Items Study: Hospital Emergency Rooms Already "At Breaking Point" (Hear Interview with one of the authors) Survey: U.S. Journalists Express Skepticism About Pandemic Preparedness Bi-Partisan Senators Urge US Dept of Agriculture To Improve Monitoring

Index of audio interviews is below.  Click on a title for details.  Streamed audio plays in Windows Media Player.

-- Avian Flu Biosecurity Expert Finds Government Pandemic Risk Analysis Lacking and U.S. Hospital Industry Unprepared

-- Bi-Partisan Senators Urge US Dept of Agriculture To Improve Avian Flu Monitoring; USDA Officials Are Also Interviewed

-- SPECIAL FEATURE: "From the Front Line" An Interview With Top Canadian Official In Charge Of Detecting Viral Spread From Birds

-- Forget About Pandemic...New Study Finds U.S. Emergency Rooms 'At Breaking Point'

-- Legal and Logistical Issues In a Pandemic: Governmental Roles, Police Powers, Hospital 'Triage' Issues and Related Topics

-- FDA Eliminates 'Informed Consent' by Patients in Pandemic 'Public Health Emergency'...Should A Pandemic Nullify Medical Privacy?

-- In Research Breakthrough Two Baylor Biochemists Go For Frontal Assault on H5N1 Virus

-- A Bit of 'Virus 101' Regarding the Nature of H5N1 From Two Experts With St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

     Note: Some other excellent audio containing both scientific and nonscientific 'pandemic risk' content is at: BirdFluRSS.com

Avian Flu Biosecurity Expert Finds Government Pandemic Risk Analysis Lacking
and U.S. Hospital Industry Unprepared

"There has been almost no realistic preparedness on the scale that is necessary in hospitals...no hospital is prepared for even a 1918 type pandemic and an H5N1 pandemic could be much worse than that."

   Dr. Eric Toner, a physician expert in hospital preparedness for pandemic influenza with the Center for Biosecurity, in a wide-ranging interview, questioned both the federal government's underlying planning assumptions and risk analysis relating to an avian flu pandemic as well as both the government's and the hospital industry's lack of attentiveness to the true scale of needed resources.  This expert interview covers: (a) the severe nature of the H5N1 infection itself (b) the shortcomings of the federal government's optimistic impact assumptions (c) the need for "in-hospital" treatment of afflicted persons in intensive care settings on ventilators ... a far cry from "chicken soup and aspirin" and (d) the failure of the federal government, and to some extent the hospital industry, to fully fathom the implications of a pandemic that could hit between one-quarter and one-third of the U.S. population during the first year of a pandemic flu when the population is most vulnerable due to the relatively long lead time for development of a truly accurate "virus-specific" vaccine to be developed.

   Listen to streamed interview (running time = 25:00)         Get MP3 of interview        Listen to MP3 Stream         Get Full Transcript Of This Interview
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   Go To Expanded Feature Page With Interview In Sections By Topics Covered

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Senators Urge USDA To Improve Surveillance, Coordination, Communication and Preparation Regarding H5N1

     A bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators has written a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns with a number of comments and recommendations.  The letter is relatively brief and worth reading.

     We also were able to catch up with two officials of the USDA for recent audio interviews:

     (a) Dr. Elizabeth Lautner talks about the USDA's efforts to train overseas depts. of agriculture to better monitor and combat Avian flu.

     (b) The USDA's top veterinarian, Dr. John Clifford, talks about the overall effort in the U.S. to monitor and prepare for H5N1 in birds.

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Forget About Pandemic...New Study Finds U.S. Emergency Rooms 'At Breaking Point'

   "We're worried about a car crash that has 10, 15 or 20 victims ... let alone a pandemic."  Dr. Brent Asplin

     We don't need a pandemic to overwhelm hospital ERs...they're already overwhelmed!  ER utilization is growing at twice the rate of the U.S. population... to the point where, on average, every minute of every day an ambulance is diverted from its original destination hospital to another hospital because of ER overcrowding.  The National Academies, a prestigious confederation of scientific and medical research organizations, exhaustively studied hospital-based emergency care and issued a Report concluding that hospital emergency departments are "overburdened, underfunded and highly fragmented."  In addition, over 400 hospital emergency departments have closed over the last 10 years.  One of the experts on the study committee was Dr. Brent Asplin, head of an emergency department in St. Paul, Minnesota, who was good enough to talk about both the hospital ER crisis in respect to the present-day situation as well as implications in a pandemic context.

   Listen to streamed interview  (running time: 7:00)        Get MP3 of This Interview (click to listen, right click to save)

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Legal and Logistical Issues In a Pandemic: Declaration Of An Emergency, Governmental Roles, Quarantines,
Police Powers, Hospital 'Triage' and Capacity Issues and Related Topics

   Attorney David Massa, Chairman of the MidAmerica Public Health Law Emergency Response Committee and Partner in the St. Louis law firm of Gallop, Johnson & Newman, discusses numerous crucial legal, governmental and logistical issues that a pandemic would raise, including: (a) what laws govern emergencies, who declares emegencies and what is the significance of doing so? (b) how far-reaching can local and federal 'police powers' be during an officially declared emergency? (c) to what extent can there be cross-jurisdictional coordination in a region or city among federal, state, county and city agencies and, in this respect, do federal powers trump state and local powers through FEMA? (d) what issues are raised relating to the ability of hospitals to screen or 'triage' patients who are afflicted during a pandemic? (e) can a hospital turn away patients if it is functioning at capacity in respect to either the intensive care units or the general medical/surgical floors? (f) what issues arise with respect to possible 'quarantines' of people, either on a small area basis or a larger area basis, and who has the authority to impose such quarantines? and (g) what areas of law actually remain vague, unaddressed and/or in need of further clarification in the context of a possible pandemic crisis event?

   Listen to streamed interview (running time = 25:00)        Get MP3 of This Interview (click to listen, right click to save)

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FDA Moves to Eliminate 'Informed Consent' by Patients in Pandemic Context of a 'Public Health Emergency'...
What Are the Implications of This in A Medical Privacy Context And In the Context of Patients' Rights?
Will a 'Pandemic Emergency' Essentially Nullify Medical Privacy and Patients' Rights ?

   In a public health emergency some very difficult issues confront both the government and the public when it comes to questions such as: Should 'informed consent' in regards to medical testing be waived in the interest of the general public health?  Should testing be mandatory?   Can treatment, including vaccines, be foreced on people even against their wishes in a declared emergency?  These are questions that go to the balance of individual rights versus the 'public interest' in a public health crisis, particularly in the context of an officially declared emergency when the government's police and other powers become virtually limitless (see the interview below with the attorney David Massa.)
   On June 7, 2006 the Federal Drug Administration issued a new rule eliminating 'informed consent' in a public health emergency and putting other measures into effect.   (Go Here for the full text of the rule.)
   The Chairperson of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, Dr. Deborah Peel, discusses both the apparent lack of due process in respect to the FDA's move and other concerns about the new rule itself.

   Listen To This Interview (running time=8:45)

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In Research Breakthrough Two Baylor Biochemists Go For Frontal Assault on H5N1 Virus

   Two members of the Baylor College of Medicine's Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston, Texas have discovered and analyzed a key part of the H5N1 virus that enhances the virulence of this 'avian flu' virus by enabling the virus to counteract the host animal's or human's immune system.  Lead researcher Dr. B. V. Venkataram Prasad was joined by graduate student Zachary A. Bornholdt in learning more about the scientific mechanisms that permit the crucial HS1 protein to 'bind' H5N1 to critical molecules in a host's cell structure.  This knowledge, it is hoped, will lead to a more frontal attack on H5N1 in the form of an 'antiviral' drug -- as distinguished from a longer-to-produce vaccine -- that could be administered directly into infected persons and, thus, interrupt the pernicious destructive effect of H5N1 on a person's immune system.  Their findings were originally announced on May 22, 2006; we were able to catch up with the two researchers who discussed their findings in relatively 'plain English' as well as the potential significance thereof.  Although additional research needs to be done and numerous steps would have to take place prior to the emergence of a distributable medication, this discovery could be a very significant first step in attacking the intricate actual molecular biology of H5N1 itself, particularly its ability to neutralize a host's immune system, even potentially leading to similar antivirals for other families of viruses that also disrupt a host's immune system (i.e., ebola, smallpox, etc.)

   Listen to this audio interview (running time = 8:50)

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A Bit of 'Virus 101' Regarding the Nature of H5N1...
Interview With Drs. Richard Webby and Erich Hoffmann of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

   These two experts are in the Infections Diseases Department of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, one of five major flu research centers in the world that are officially coordinating research into H5N1 with the World Health Organization.
    They were interviewed as to the science and the transmission of the so-called 'avian flu' or H5N1 virus.  The audio runs 16:00 minutes.
    Among other points that they discussed were: (a) some basics of viruses, (b) H5N1's ability to move inter-species, meaning unlike other viruses, its apparent ability to 'jump' even in its present form (unmutated any further) from certain animals to humans and, now it appears, human-to-human through what they call 'aerosolized' transmission (i.e., sneezing), (c) the possibility that H5N1 is more evolved in terms of its lethality than the flu of 1918, (d) comments on the relative possible going-forward fatality rates as compared with the present 50%+ fatality rate in humans thus far (these researchers do expect a lower fatality rate in a broad pandemic event), (e) the geographic transmission of H5N1 by both uninfected birds that are just 'transmission modules' as well as by infected birds that are either 'wild birds' that are migrating or are 'poultry birds' transported by humans, and (f) their coordination with the World Health Organization and other organiztions.

    Listen to this audio interview (running time = 16:00)

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