# 702
The Governor of Georgia, to his credit, has vetoed the state's budget and apparently intends to call a special session of the legislature to, among other things, restore funding for additional antiviral medication purchases.
This from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.
Flu fears partly behind budget veto
State wants funds to fight pandemic
By Bill Hendrick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/25/07The director of the Georgia Division of Public Health said Tuesday that Gov. Sonny Perdue was disappointed that the Legislature eliminated his $15.7 million request for medication to fight a possible bird flu pandemic in the 2007 midyear budget.
Dr. Stuart Brown, who heads the state's public health apparatus, said in an interview that one reason the funds were cut was that the disease has dropped from public discourse. "I don't think it was just a perception of wolf-crying, but you can be anxious only so long," he said.
The Legislature's decision to cut the money for Tamiflu and other antivirals was one of the reasons Perdue vetoed the midyear budget, his communications director, Dan McLagan, said Tuesday.
The 2008 budget, which includes $7 million for antivirals, has been approved by the General Assembly. Perdue has said he will call a special session of the Legislature to deal anew with the 2007 midyear budget.
"We are disappointed that it's not $15.7 million," Brown said. "We're pleased there's $7 million [in the 2008 budget] and relieved it's not zero."
McLagan ducked specific questions about whether Perdue would seek to have the Legislature appropriate funds for antivirals in the special session.
"There were some critical items cut out, including antiviral vaccine," McLagan said. The governor "thinks the purchase of antiviral medications is a very responsible thing to do, or he wouldn't have put it in the budget. And with bird flu, it's like anything; yes, it hasn't happened but that's only true until it isn't."
He said state officials would "feel pretty stupid if we only had half as much as we needed" if what Brown said is an inevitable pandemic occurs.
The failure to fully fund antivirals by the Georgia Legislature has been blamed, at least in part, on the general public's lack of concern over the pandemic threat.
This lack of public discourse over the threat of a pandemic has been caused, in large measure, by a failure of our own government in making the threat clear.
Granted, the Secretary of the HHS Michael Leavitt has done a good job, traveling to every state over the past year to attend pandemic summits, but for the most part, State and Federal officials remain mum on the issue.
When was the last time an elected official gave a speech on pandemic preparedness? How often was it mentioned during the mid-term elections?
The fear, commonly expressed by officials, is they don't want to generate `panic'.
Instead, by ignoring the issue, they've generated apathy.
If it were important, people reason, politicians would be talking about it. And they aren't. And so the public assumes the threat is overblown.
A day doesn't go by when terrorism, up to and including the detonation of a nuclear bomb in one of our cities, doesn't get mentioned on the news. Yet somehow, the greater threat of a pandemic gets ignored.
Despite governmental concerns, the people of the United States are mature enough to handle the concept of preparing for a pandemic. We handled the specter of nuclear annihilation for 50 years, and while concerns ran high, I never saw any panic.
Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we accepted the risks, and took the precautions our government suggested, and no one panicked.
At the age of 8, I learned to `duck and cover', and I knew enough not to look at the flash of a thermonuclear detonation. I could even tell my parents the symptoms of radiation poisoning. All courtesy of pamphlets provided by the civil defense, and distributed in elementary and high schools.
Ask any baby boomer.
We can handle the truth.
