President Bush is expected this week to approve a 240-page emergency plan detailing how the federal government will respond to an avian flu pandemic, with the potential to kill from 210,000 to 1.9 million Americans, reports The Washington Post. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, has created a medical exam that can be conducted in VA hospital parking lots and plans to staff a toll-free hotline with nurses to help individuals decide if they need medical care. The VA has also stockpiled medicines, equipment, food, and water at its 153 hospitals. But many vital decisions—such as how much avian flu vaccine will be required and who should get it—have not yet been made, according to the article. Individual communities also have to create their own avian-flu readiness plan, said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt in a speech last week. “Any community that fails to prepare—with the expectation that the federal government can come to the rescue—will be tragically wrong,” he said.
The federal government is also “dangerously behind” on building a prototype of a 250-bed mobile field hospital that could be used to treat those injured during a terrorist attack or natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, according to USA Today. Homeland Security received $20 million in 2005 to build the field hospital, but Congress rescinded the funding this year. Although the agency says it will request more funding from Congress to build the prototype, critics say it should have already set standards for how mobile hospitals should operate. Homeland Security doesn’t get “the notion that during a disaster one of the fundamental needs is taking care of a large number of patients," Jerome Hauer, former head of the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness, told USA Today.
