In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

John Bussey of the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting piece in Friday’s edition (n.b. it is behind a pay wall) about what the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak might teach us about dealing with the H1N1 flu. Bussey, who is currently the Journal’s Washington bureau chief and covered Asia for the paper during 2003, says that the SARS experience should be cautionary for those who think that officials who warn about the continued potential danger of the H1N1 are just crying wolf:

“No one wants to be Chicken Little, wailing against the falling sky. But the folks who ignored the warnings, and played down the emerging impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, put their businesses and the safety of their staff at risk. Roughly 8,000 people caught the disease, about 10% of them died and a large number of survivors were maimed by frantic, emergency treatments. The regional economy, and many businesses, got hammered…Now there is fresh debate over a new bout of contagion — swine flu, or H1N1. Did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security the World Health Organization and any number of bureaucrats and politicians overreact?…Here is a different view of what happened: Even if this outbreak doesn’t get more serious, consider the past few weeks a practice run for the real one, a worthwhile expense to test preparedness in the U.S. And if frogs didn’t rain down from the sky as you might have expected — consider yourself lucky.”

Thanks to Bruce Hennes from Cleveland, Ohio for bringing this article to my attention.