- (CP) - An influenza pandemic would dramatically disrupt
the processing and distribution of food supplies across the world, emptying
grocery store shelves and creating crippling shortages for months, an expert
warned Thursday.
-
- Dr. Michael Osterholm suggested policy makers must start
intensive planning to figure out how to ensure food supplies for their
populations during a time when international travel may be grounded or
severely cut back, when workers are too sick to process or deliver food
and when people will be too fearful of disease to gather in restaurants.
-
- Food and other essential goods like drugs and surgical
masks will be available at best in limited supplies, Osterholm cautioned
in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, which devoted a number of
articles to the threat of pandemic influenza.
-
- He saved his most flatly wor on for somewhere between
18 months and three years as the expected successive waves of pandemic
flu buffet the world.
-
- "I think we'll have a very limited food supply,"
he said in the interview.
-
- "As soon as you shut down both the global travel
and trade . . . and (add to it) the very real potential to shut down over-land
travel within a country, there are very few areas that will be hit as quickly
as will be food, given the perishable nature of it."
-
- Osterholm has been one of the most vocal proponents of
the urgent need to prepare for a flu pandemic that could sicken at least
a third of the world's population and kill many millions. However, he is
not alone in fearing the world may be facing a pandemic, widely viewed
as the single most disruptive and deadly infectious disease event known
to humankind.
-
- The lingering outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu strain that
has decimated poultry stocks in wide swathes of Southeast Asia has influenza
experts the world over losing sleep over the poully the potential effect
on human productivity," Garrett, a Pulitzer-prize winning former journalist
and author of The Coming Plague, said in an article in the journal.
-
- "It is therefore impossible to reckon accurately
the potential global economic impact."
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- Osterholm said it is incumbent on governments to start
identifying essential basic commodities and figuring out supply and delivery
for a time when long-distance truckers may balk at travelling to affected
communities and armed forces personnel may be too sick to fill in the gaps.
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- http://www.canada.com/health/story.html?id=246093
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