News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The US government announced a total of $971 million in health emergency preparedness grants to states and territories yesterday, including $619 million for public health departments and $352 million for healthcare systems.

(CIDRAP News) – With the health of small businesses at stake in fragile economic times, federal officials and one of the nation's top business groups pushed new efforts this week to help companies prepare for the next wave of the H1N1 pandemic influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – A new report from the University of Minnesota warns that an influenza pandemic could disrupt the coal industry, thereby endangering the nation's significantly coal-dependent electric power system and everything that depends on it.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today released their official guidance on allocating vaccine during an influenza pandemic, with few changes from a previous draft that put military personnel, critical health and emergency workers, pregnant women, and small children at the head of the line.

(CIDRAP News) – Anticipating that a terrorist attack, influenza pandemic, or natural disaster will someday exhaust regional or national critical care systems, an expert task force recently issued a comprehensive series of reports that takes stock of current capabilities and recommends a surge framework that would care for as many patients as possible but would necessarily exclude some.

(CIDRAP News) – Predictions and observations at this week's conference on business preparedness for pandemic influenza ran the gamut from how fast a pandemic would circle the globe to how well the Internet would hold up, with many topics in between.

(CIDRAP News) – Two national groups of infectious disease experts urged the White House to make the development of vaccines the most important element in the nation's pandemic influenza plan.

(CIDRAP News) – The White House today released a lengthy new plan describing how the government intends to cope with an influenza pandemic, but officials continued to stress their standard message that states and communities will have to rely mainly on themselves in that situation, with the federal government in an advisory role.

(CIDRAP News) – National health officials came to Minnesota today to launch what was billed as the first of 50 state pandemic influenza planning meetings around the nation, emphasizing the key roles of state and local governments as partners with the federal government.

The general theme of the half-day conference was that much, if not most, of the real work of preparing for a pandemic must be done at the local and state levels.