Madeline Albright
Last night we had the wonderful opportunity to meet with Madeline Albright, and even though she stands about 4 foot 10, she's seems tough as nails and yet is extremely eloquent. While we only had about 10 minutes with her she discussed the importance of public health and education in today's society. A fellow student asked her how she balances family life with work, to which she answered "Unfortunately, every mother's middle name is guilt", and spoke on the importance of helping each other out, commenting that "there is a special place in hell for a woman who fails to help another woman" See what I mean, tough but eloquent. Her speech stressed the importance of preparing for the worst and learning from past failures to prevent or at the least diminish future failures.
She discussed the parallels between what happened after hurricane Katrina and how not preparing for a pandemic of Influenza, could result in the same sort of disastrous public health, economical national crisis. A fellow student and I were discussing about how Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and how much of New Orleans could have been spared with the construction of sufficient levees However, because there was the mindset of "it won't/can't happen to us", and "let us deal with issues at hand versus preparing for the worst", the absolute worst situation did happen, and the area and people that were directly affected, in addition to those indirectly affected, are still struggling to comeback. That is how we justified the importance of devoting resources to pandemic preparedness even though there are obviously a countless number of other public health problems facing the country and the world today.
This morning Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC, talked about the challenges facing pandemic preparedness as well as steps the CDC is taking to combat those challenges. There were also three panel discussions held this morning. The first one was on how various large businesses are addressing pandemic preparedness with representatives from Tyson, Exxon Mobile, 3M, and Deloitte discussing the steps they have already taken and the challenges they have been facing. The second panel discussion was on the role of government and pandemic preparedness. A question I had after this discussion arose after Alfonso Martinez-Fonts, who was representing the Department of Homeland Security, made the comment that the federal government is trying to make clear now that if a pandemic of influenza were to hit the U.S., state and local governments need to be prepared to deal with the situation, and not look to the federal government for much aid. I wonder how they expect state and local governments to be adequately prepared in the face of large budget cuts, where many state and local offices are left with a limited amount of resources that are often devoted to problems that are already happening, versus a situation like pandemic influenza that does not have a definitive arrival date.
The third panel discussion was on the role of the media in the light of a pandemic of flu. There were writers and reporters from such media as the Washington Post and Bloomberg News among others on the panel. One thing I never even thought about was how the internet may be affected if a severe pandemic hit. If millions of people were forced to stay home, work from home and students would have to attend online classes, the internet would be overloaded and could crash. Since the internet is a place where a growing percentage of people rely of receiving their daily news, panic, frustration, and fear of the unknown could occur. Bottom line, things have been brought to my attention that I never would have even thought about in terms of how important planning and being prepared is.