From Salon.com's warroom: (thanks to SYP for the link)
If you liked Iraq, you're gonna love the avian flu
Maybe they really are tired.
We weren't particular impressed when we heard Donald Rumsfeld's plan for Iraq, but that was before AMERICAblog's John Aravosis tipped us off to Mike Leavitt's plan for the avian flu.
Speaking at a flu summit meeting in Wyoming Friday, the president's health and human services secretary said that Americans can't expect the federal government to take care of them if a pandemic strikes. His advice: Stockpile food in your bedroom.
"When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed," Leavitt said. "When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk, put it under the bed. When you do that for a period of four to six months, you are going to have a couple of weeks of food. And that's what we're talking about."
The problem with this preparation tactic is that it assumes you'll be able to get under your bed, and that you'll have potable water to drink. I don't want to be an alarmist (see the folks who moved to the stix to ride out the riots of the scary millennium) but when (not if) the pandemic becomes a reality our reliance on magic water faucets and the never ending electric supply could seriously come back to haunt us. Can we not stop and learn ANYTHING from the Katrina disaster? Imagine even a mild hurricane, tornado, earthquake that hits during the same time that a third of the population is suffering from about of the bird flu (But mom, I told Jimmy not to lick the sick chicken) for our 'stable' infrastructure to crumble under us like a tar-papered house in the 9th Ward.
So, go ahead, stock pile the tuna and the yummy powdered milk but don't plan on basic services like garbage removal, cleaning running water, or electricity. But while you're at the store though, could you pick up some Twinkies... I hear they last forever!
2 comments:
Hate to be a non-alarmist, but I think from the point of view of our lifetimes, the correct word probably is "if," at least if you're talking about a 1918-style mass killer. If such a pandemic were to come about, my first fear would not be for the ensuing cholera epidemic from the sanitation infrastructure breaking down, although it would be wise to lay in a supply of pure water or this (my choice).
I think one thing we learned from Katrina was that you could easily expend the entire GDP of the country for disaster preparedness if you wanted to, and there still woudn't be government and water trucks bringing the stuff door to door a day or two after the disaster struck. So the idea of having some emergency provisions isn't something to be mocked in its own right, but only if you think that's the only thing the government is advocating.
That was supposed to say "government food and water trucks."
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