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The Scariest Thing About the H1N1 Outbreak - Ain't the Flu!

So, what are the lessons we've already learned from H1N1?

• Public Health has proven itself irrelevant.
• Health Ministers, (provincial and federal), have led by incompetence.
• The "system" is such that we rely on the drowning to throw us a safety line.

All we've heard in the past 6 months are assurances about "Preparedness Planning" and the lessons we learned from SARS.

Let's face it - there's been no measure of preparation, planning, or or obvious learning demonstrated by Public Health at any level in this country now that we are WEEKS into Round Two of the Swine Flu Outbreak.

It's "scary" enough that this flu is attacking the young and healthy among us. Scary because all the warnings sounded a lot like overblown hype, and the general population was infected by a complacency that could be more dangerous than the flu or the vaccine! But thatmindset shifted in a hurry this week with the tragic news of Evan Frustaglio's death.

It's scarier still that Public Health seems to be playing catch up in a game that started early last Spring. I recall sitting in the Media Studio at Queen's Park last April, the day David Caplan, (our now former Health Minister), introduced Dr. Arelene King as the province's new Medical Officer of Health. It just so happened to be around the time we started reporting on deaths in Mexico; an upper respiratory illness was the common denominator, and a few medical observers were starting to mentionSwine-Flu . Needless to say, King's first meeting with the Queen's Park Media Gallery was dominated by questions about our "preparedness". The Minister deferred to the expertise of Dr. King, who, we were reminded, had been through the 2003 SARS battles in Ontario.

Two things occurred to me that day. First, David Caplan was in over his head. He had no answers. (I honestly thought that would be a long term problem as this thing progressed.It was the E-health scandal, however, that drove a stake in his ministerial duties and reinforced my lack of confidence in his abilities to handle the helm in Health.) Caplan was either ill informed or ill prepared that day. Second, Dr. King assured a skeptical media pack that we had learned great lessons from the SARS experience; that we should not be fussed even though the preparedness plannning may not have been obvious to even the keenest of observers in the room.

So, in an effort to avoid hype and panic, the ministry and the media embraced the message. We were led to believe things were well in hand.

Six months later, the irony is, the nature of H1N1 may well be the best thing going for us - not our preparation or planning. If H1N1 plays to type, it won't be the great killer flu that wiped out tens of millions of lives in 1918. In fact, the number of deaths will be fewer than we'd see from a Seasonal Flu, and most people who contract H1N1 will experience mild symptoms.

And for that we should be grateful!

Why? Because we'll probably survive this, relatively unscathed, despite the "Preparedness Planning".

Toronto's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David McKeown all be admitted, Public Health isn't equipped to handle a deadly pandemic. He told us on Friday that Pandemic planning had been going on for years; in the wake of SARS it was obvious that it was not a matter of if but when a world wide flu strain would pose a major threat. Everybody thought it would come from birds. McKeown says they expected the outbreak to be far worse than the H1N1 strain we're living with today.

The scariest thing is, if that is true, if we had indeed been hit by a far more virulent, aggressive form of the flu, we would be reporting on significant death tolls and quarantine rather than line-ups at vaccine centres.

Preparednes Planning?

We've had neither.