# 869
Yesterday and today, two of the bloggers on the HHS Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog forum have come up with superlative essays on how, and why we must prepare for a pandemic. Alas, neither of these two examples of cogent writing stemmed from my keyboard.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend them.
First, Dr. Greg Dworkin gives us the rationale as to why we should be preparing for a 1918 style pandemic (or worse), and not for a mild pandemic as we saw in 1968 and 1957. His essay SARS And H5N1: The Precautionary Principle reminds us of the lessons we have yet to learn from SARS, and that the costs of not doing so with the next pandemic could be extreme.
This morning, marketing guru Nedra Weinreich gives us her take on what it will take to get the message out. In Top Down, Bottom Up, Side to Side Ms. Weinreich emphasizes that it will take both national leadership and a grassroots movement to get the job done. She sees the flubie community, everyone from flu forum members to bloggers, as being essential in this effort.
Ms Weinreich's ideas closely match my own in this regard, as evidenced by my last two weekly blogs on the HHS site here and here. The difference is, she knows what she's talking about.
If you aren't visiting the HHS blog daily, I urge you to do so. It has two weeks left to run, and the meeting in Washington D.C. this week will hopefully produce some substantive results. There will be live blogging from this event on Wednesday.
