CAVEAT: Do not be intimidated by the acronyms! If you do, you may be doing exactly what some intend for you to do, if you know what I mean. LOL
The workshop is an open meeting that seeks to bring together representatives from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, professional societies, state and local public health organizations, the academic research and development community, public interest groups, stakeholder federal agencies, and Congress.
WHERE: Fairmont Washington DC, 2401 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037
WHEN: July 31- August 2, 2007
The 2007 HHS PHEMC Enterprise Stakeholders Workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss and receive individual stakeholder feedback on HHS implementation of
Right now, I'm at the information-gathering stage, and I'm nowhere near ready to give opinions as to the pros and cons of any of this. At first look, the various plans and strategies that HHS will be receiving 'stakeholder feedback' on includes just about everything for pandemic flu except for NPI and personal preps. In the next week or so, I will post what I can unravel, ie the truth behind all the acronyms, ;-D for everyone's understanding and input. At this point, I'm inclined to be present for this process. I'll decide as I find out more.
The big-picture concept to understand is this, this whole thing is what they mean when they say "All Hazards Preparedness".
From this JAMA commentary The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act
Improving Public Health Emergency Response, Hodge et al,
On December 19, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), which is intended to improve the organization, direction, and utility of preparedness efforts.
PAHPA - centralizes federal responsibilities,
- requires state-based accountability,
- proposes new national surveillance methods,
- addresses surge capacity, and
- facilitates the development of vaccines and other scarce resources.
Under this concept, a pandemic is perceived as one example of a variety of hazards, including CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nucelar) events as well as natural hazards like hurricanes or earthquakes, except that a pandemic is so much worse than any of these other hazards that investments made for a pandemic will cover everything else. For example, enhancing disease surveillance, healthcare surge capacity, development of systems to rapidly distribute medicines and vaccines to local areas, boosting infrastructure robustness, all these developed as part of pandemic planning can be used for other disasters such as SARS, hurricane, any CBRN attack, etc.
The idea is to invest primarily in pandemic preparedness and address other threats along the way (not the other way around because of the scope and scale of a pandemic). The implicit consequence of this rationale is that all resources that would have been split up to be spent on a variety of hazards can be put together and spent as part of a pandemic preparedness package. |
