Word: osterholm
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...priorities, state and local governments are meant to take the lead on actually distributing the vaccine. It's a recipe for confusion and frustration. "We've got a new vaccine pipeline starting to flow, but at the end of it are a lot of rusty faucets," said Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, at a recent conference...
...alert level at 5, the entire pandemic-rating system will lose all meaning - and the global body, which is probably the most respected of United Nations organizations, will lose valuable authority. "I'm afraid that they're about to go off the cliff of scientific credibility," says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. (Read "5 Burning Questions About Swine...
...experts go, Osterholm has been a doomsayer, predicting that the world was far from ready for a new flu virus. But in the early days of the H1N1 outbreak, he was full of praise for the WHO's quick reaction. Now, however, he thinks that the global body, perhaps under pressure from governments that are worried about the economic impact of a full pandemic declaration, may be abandoning science-backed decision-making. "The public reaction and the media should not drive the science," he says...
...itself. So if the group allows itself to be influenced by political pressure or lets the alert levels become a simple judgment call from within the organization, then something will be lost. "The WHO is supposed to be an independent body we can all respect," says Osterholm. "The longer they wait on this, the closer they get to losing that...
...disruption that a pandemic might cause outside the health sector--what Michael Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), terms "collateral damage"--could be even worse. The "just in time" supply chain on which so many U.S. corporations rely leaves little slack and could buckle during a pandemic. In a report last year, CIDRAP noted that 40% of the U.S. coal supply, which generates half the nation's electricity, is shuttled from mines in Wyoming to the rest of the country by train. If a pandemic simultaneously sickened enough coal workers--or the tiny number...