Progress for tomorrow: Preparing for the next disaster
HEALY: But I want to go back to the issue of heart. You know, philanthropy is a very interesting example of what shows. I mean, you're putting your money where your heart is, and that's what most philanthropic giving is, whether you're supporting a medical center or a chair, whether you're supporting someone after a flood. Why is it that people are not willing to write a check for preparedness, but they open billions and billions of dollars out of the personal coffers when they see the disaster on television?
KELLERMAN: I think the issue is that Americans don't think it's going to happen to them. And you know, it's two things. One, I think a lot of Americans have fear fatigue. What is the latest thing that I'm supposed to be scared of – whether it's obesity or secondhand smoke or the latest side effect for prescription drug – and their eyes glaze over after a while, and they lose the ability to discriminate against the stuff they really need to worry about versus the stuff that maybe is important but not as important.
And the second part is we all live in a fantasy world. It's not going to happen to us. And when I'm talking to a mom and dad whose teenage son is critically injured from a car wreck, half the time they're looking at me saying this can't be happening to me; this can't be real; I'm going to wake up; it's not going to be this way. This is why we have trouble getting people to focus on emergency care in general, because none of us in this room are ever going to be in an ER, none of us are ever going to have our life depending on having critical access to care. We're not going to be in the disaster.
SARS happened in another country. It might be one of the most sophisticated cities in North America, but it wasn't an American city, and so it wasn't as real. So I think unless it's real and we're living it, then it's an abstraction and we don't think ahead. We all live in a fantasy world.
HEALY: Now, you said something very interesting, which is the mom and dad with their child whose just been in a car accident – if we look at pandemic flu – actually smallpox for the matter is just less likely to be so disseminated. We're not talking about the potential for 90 million people affected. But if we look at pandemic flu, how many people who think they know a lot about the risk of pandemic flu know that it is their children – the young - K through 12, twenty-somethings – those are the ones that are most likely to die from it.
KELLERMAN: If it's like 1918.
HEALY: If it's like 1918, which all the public health people are saying it's likely to be. I mean, even the scientists who are comparing these viruses are saying this does not look like the '57. This looks like 1918. It has the spine of a bird flu. All right, and the experience from Asia, Turkey, is that it is the young. I think the mean age is about nineteen, as a matter of fact. And you know, those grandmas are plucking the chicken, too. The kids may be playing with it, but grandmas are plucking those chickens. But for some reason, we're seeing something that seems to be affecting the young people, which is what happened in 1918. If it's our children, and it could be children in every city in this country, 40 percent of Americans attack rate, why doesn't that stir the passions or is it that people don't know about it?
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