Progress for tomorrow: Preparing for the next disaster
HEALY: I'd like to get back to something that – again, we're looking about preparing, in a very practical way, in the trenches, for what might happen six months from now, two years from now. And you mentioned meningitis on college campuses, and certainly that is something that is – in fact, you can go on the website of some of the university associations and they'll have plans for what you do if there's meningitis on a campus and it informs family members what to do and students what to do. Actually, I even saw one on SARS and how you deal with that in students coming from abroad.
Now, tell me, what about college campuses? We have, what, more than a million students on residential campuses. They're almost like they're in the military. They're all close together. Again, mentioning what I said earlier, they may be uniquely vulnerable to something like smallpox because they haven't been vaccinated, at least anybody under 40, or perhaps biologically sensitive to H5N1 – at least there's a hint of that. All right, when you do come up with a plan for college campuses?
BENJAMIN: Now. (Chuckles.) You know, the problem with college –
HEALY: Oh, we don't have it yet?
BENJAMIN: I know. The problem with college campuses of course is that, yes, they're living in the conjugal setting, but for those of us who can still remember – and although every year it's getting a little more tough, they share, they eat after each other, they drink after each other, and they share lots of things. And so college campuses are a real potential problem, particularly if you have a disease which preferentially strikes people at that age group. So it is a problem. And then you have people who you can't send them home. You have people here who are from in and out of state, and if there's transportation limitations – you have people here from other countries – you have a whole range of things that have to happen. And then of course you have the parents who have now decided that they're going to come to the campus and either stay with their child because they want to help take care of them, or leave campus with their child in a scenario in which you've said they can't leave campus because health authorities have said they can't leave campus, or parents can't come in. So you're going to have to figure all of those rules out. It is a big deal on a college campus.
HEALY: Now, I've heard it said from some people in the leadership of universities and colleges that, well, we'll just shut them down and send all the kids home.
INGLESBY: I think as a practical measure that would happen in a lot of places right now because the idea of trying to keep people in dorms I think would become indefensible pretty quickly. If there were actually a couple of cases in a dorm at University X downtown, I don't think the leaders of the university could keep going for some time. It may in the end not be useful in the event that the people who are going to get sick are going to get sick at some point in the next year anyway – we don't know that yet - but it might slow it down, it might give us more time to develop a vaccine, as Art was saying before.
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