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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=880ba74a-b902-46d4-bd44-a71d212140ef
CDC tests pandemic readiness in drill that pretends bird flu cases are in U.S.
Helen Branswell, Canadian Press
Published: Monday, February 05, 2007
ATLANTA - As they settle into assigned seats in a small conference room in Atlanta, the fictional scenario laid out for the most senior emergency and infectious disease experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is grim.
A gravely ill Indonesian man who has just returned to Washington, D.C., from Jakarta has tested positive for H5N1 avian influenza. The 22-year-old student was infected by his father, a confirmed H5N1 case who had since died.
Two of the student's housemates are ill; three members of his swim team are also sick. Complicating matters, the swim team has travelled by bus to New York City for a competition and is now quarantined there in a hotel.
Two travellers who were on planes with the student have fallen ill. A man has died of acute respiratory distress syndrome in a Chicago hospital; a woman in Maryland is suffering from milder flu symptoms.
It is 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, and the United States appears to be one of the first countries hit by an emerging influenza pandemic. The news is sobering but the picture murky - just as it would be in the first worrisome hours and days of a pandemic.
It is, however, just an exercise. More than 300 CDC employees are taking part in what is supposed to be a 24-hour drill Wednesday and into Thursday morning, simulating how spread to and within the U.S. might unfold and how the agency would respond.
In the high-tech but crowded Director's Emergency Operations Center and adjacent break-out rooms, staff begin deploying disease investigation teams to Washington, New York and Jakarta. In acronym-laden CDC-speak, the facility is known as the DEOC, which is pronounced as DEE-ock.
All major outbreaks are managed out of the DEOC. It's not just a facility, it's a state of dread for staff called to abandon their offices and their daily routine to join crisis management teams for exhausting crises like 9-11, the anthrax attacks, SARS, the monkeypox outbreak and Katrina.
"This is important stuff. We're going to learn a lot. That's the point," CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding says as she kicks off the exercise, noting if staff don't push themselves to the point where they make mistakes, "we won't learn anything."
-
8:30 a.m.: Gerberding and designated senior staff meet in the director's conference room, one of several ringing the DEOC. Included are the heads of the emergency response and quarantine divisions, the head and deputy head of influenza, the agency's chief science officer and other key players.
The group learns that at 8:24 a.m., the president moved the U.S. up one notch on its pandemic staging ladder, a step closer to a pandemic.
After being briefed, Gerberding raises a series of questions and asks the experts to get staff to work on addressing them. Among them: Do embassies abroad need evacuation plans for Americans overseas?
Recommendations need to be drafted for the U.S. Secretary of Health, Michael Leavitt, on possible interventions and on whether a public health emergency should be declared. There is ready agreement the declaration is necessary.
(part one)
CDC tests pandemic readiness in drill that pretends bird flu cases are in U.S.
Helen Branswell, Canadian Press
Published: Monday, February 05, 2007
ATLANTA - As they settle into assigned seats in a small conference room in Atlanta, the fictional scenario laid out for the most senior emergency and infectious disease experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is grim.
A gravely ill Indonesian man who has just returned to Washington, D.C., from Jakarta has tested positive for H5N1 avian influenza. The 22-year-old student was infected by his father, a confirmed H5N1 case who had since died.
Two of the student's housemates are ill; three members of his swim team are also sick. Complicating matters, the swim team has travelled by bus to New York City for a competition and is now quarantined there in a hotel.
Two travellers who were on planes with the student have fallen ill. A man has died of acute respiratory distress syndrome in a Chicago hospital; a woman in Maryland is suffering from milder flu symptoms.
It is 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, and the United States appears to be one of the first countries hit by an emerging influenza pandemic. The news is sobering but the picture murky - just as it would be in the first worrisome hours and days of a pandemic.
It is, however, just an exercise. More than 300 CDC employees are taking part in what is supposed to be a 24-hour drill Wednesday and into Thursday morning, simulating how spread to and within the U.S. might unfold and how the agency would respond.
In the high-tech but crowded Director's Emergency Operations Center and adjacent break-out rooms, staff begin deploying disease investigation teams to Washington, New York and Jakarta. In acronym-laden CDC-speak, the facility is known as the DEOC, which is pronounced as DEE-ock.
All major outbreaks are managed out of the DEOC. It's not just a facility, it's a state of dread for staff called to abandon their offices and their daily routine to join crisis management teams for exhausting crises like 9-11, the anthrax attacks, SARS, the monkeypox outbreak and Katrina.
"This is important stuff. We're going to learn a lot. That's the point," CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding says as she kicks off the exercise, noting if staff don't push themselves to the point where they make mistakes, "we won't learn anything."
-
8:30 a.m.: Gerberding and designated senior staff meet in the director's conference room, one of several ringing the DEOC. Included are the heads of the emergency response and quarantine divisions, the head and deputy head of influenza, the agency's chief science officer and other key players.
The group learns that at 8:24 a.m., the president moved the U.S. up one notch on its pandemic staging ladder, a step closer to a pandemic.
After being briefed, Gerberding raises a series of questions and asks the experts to get staff to work on addressing them. Among them: Do embassies abroad need evacuation plans for Americans overseas?
Recommendations need to be drafted for the U.S. Secretary of Health, Michael Leavitt, on possible interventions and on whether a public health emergency should be declared. There is ready agreement the declaration is necessary.
(part one)
