Even though this isn't my calling anymore, I decided that this was important enough to make it to the blog. This isn't meant to scare anyone, but to bring an awareness to a potentially dangerous, but plausibly diffusible situation. I'm talking about Avian Influenza, also known as the Bird Flu.According to Wikipedia, there have been approximately 3 pandemics each century for the the last 300 years. The most virulent pandemic flu was in 1918, killing over 50 million people worldwide. The flu affected all ages and came in three waves between the late Summer of 1918 and the Spring of 1919. It left thousands of children orphaned and millions of families torn apart. My husband's great-grandparents and great-great grandparents lived in New York City at the time and died in the pandemic leaving his grandfather orphaned. The following is an excerpt, taken from Pandemicflu.gov, of what life was like:
As the disease spread, schools and businesses emptied. Telegraph and
telephone services collapsed as operators took to their beds. Garbage went
uncollected as garbage men reported sick. The mail piled up as postal carriers
failed to come to work. State and local departments of health also suffered
from high absentee rates. No one was left to record the pandemic’s spread and
the Public Health Service’s requests for information went unanswered.
As the bodies accumulated, funeral parlors ran out of caskets and bodies went
uncollected in morgues... In many communities, quarantines were imposed to prevent the spread of the disease. Schools, theaters, saloons, pool halls and even churches were all closed.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the world is long overdue for another such episode.
On Thursday, March 20th, the Newnan Times-Herald published an article about a presentation done by Coweta County Environmental Health Director Duane Fields to the Coweta Board of Health on the bird flu and preparations that Coweta County is making to get ready for an outbreak. According to the article, "the key to containing the deadly disease will lie in parents' willingness to contain their children in their homes for weeks or even months at a time...[If] parents can manage to keep their children at home, it will reduce the number of flu attacks by 93 percent...That's because children are natural incubators for diseases like the flu, which rely on close personal contact to spread effectively. "
If the key to containing this disease is staying home for weeks and possibly months at a time, it is all the more important that we begin and continue to build our 3-month's supply of food that the First Presidency has encouraged us to have. Granted, this is a dire reason to be prepared. It is more likely that you will need to use your food supply because of a financial hardship than because of something like this. However, this is definitely something to think and ponder about. Having just had the regular flu myself for the last 5 days, I wish we would have been a bit more prepared ourselves by way of food stuffs. We had food in the house, it just wasn't organized in a way that made it easy for my son or husband to make a meal. I also realized that I did not have enough disinfectant wipes or Klennex in the house. It was definitely a lesson in preparedness for our family.
There are definitely reasons why the Lord, through the First Presidency, has asked us to be prepared. The possibility of another pandemic flu is definitely a good one; but we should be prepared because we realize that this is a commandment with a promise..."but if ye are prepared ye shall not fear" (D&C 38:20). If we follow the counsels of our Heavenly Father, we will have nothing to fear--not illness, job loss, financial recession, food shortage, nothing.
