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PM Pandemic (Part 1)
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
For Larry Smith, the big question is not whether there will be a pandemic, but when. He's not kidding, either. And neither is the World Health Organization or immunologist Michael Osterholm.
Smith is the president of Louisville, Ken.-based consulting company the Institute for Crisis Management. The WHO is the United Nations' agency that was established in 1948 to promote world health. And Osterholm is the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Osterholm also authored Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, and is considered one of the world's foremost infectious disease experts.
Why are these two experts and a global health care organization getting all worked up about the pandemic? Are they crying wolf? Is it a stunt to sell books and make millions for sensationalist mongers who delight in scare tactics so they can further their own cause? Sorry. This is the real thing. Nod indifference and you could die.
The pandemic flu is a rare but recurrent event, according to the WHO. There were three pandemics in the previous century: the Spanish influenza in 1918, Asian influenza in 1957 and Hong Kong influenza in 1968. The 1918 pandemic, which was considered one of the deadliest disease events in human history, killed approximately 40 to 50 million people worldwide.
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