Epidemic Preparedness Quotes

Meanwhile, weeks of occupation undermined French military preparedness. The most obvious factor was the impact of epidemic disease, which was favored by warm weather and the unsanitary conditions of the crowded French encampments and burned-out houses that the troops commandeered. But a new factor—plunder itself—played a prominent part.

In a strange looping effect, the false alert was produced by the very preparedness apparatus that was supposed to deal with it.

For years, international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), institutions like the World Economic Forum and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI – launched at the Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos), and individuals like Bill Gates have been warning us about the next pandemic risk, even specifying that it: 1) would emerge in a highly populated place where economic development forces people and wildlife together; 2) would spread quickly and silently by exploiting networks of human travel and trade; and 3) would reach multiple countries by thwarting containment. As we will see in the following chapters, properly characterizing the pandemic and understanding its characteristics are vital because they were what underpinned the differences in terms of preparedness.

the US CDC’s 2011 pandemic preparedness campaign mobilised popular fascination with the ‘undead’ in what has been hailed as the most successful communication stint of the agency (Fraustino and Ma 2015; Halabi et al. 2013; Kruvand and Silver 2013): Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (Silver 2011).

The goal, in other words, is not to reach specialists in the relevant fields, but rather to encourage discussion among general readers and students with an interest in the history of epidemic diseases and a concern about our preparedness as a society to meet new microbial challenges.

dramatically exposing the lack of preparedness of the international community to confront a potentially global health emergency; by awakening primordial Western fears of the jungle and untamed nature; and by feeding on racial anxieties about “darkest” Africa

For Americans, the decade’s most notorious epidemic was one that never happened. In 1976, President Gerald Ford’s administration became convinced that an outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix, Maryland, would lead to an epidemic on the scale of 1918 and spent $135 million on vaccines. But the flu didn’t spread, uptake was poor and the government ended up paying out almost $100 million to victims of vaccine-related Guillain-Barré syndrome. In a real epidemic, flu is a greater risk factor than the vaccine but in 1976, the solution was worse than the problem. The fiasco was a major blow to pandemic preparedness.