Dr. Eric Toner Blog post

Here is an interesting interview with Dr. Eric Toner about pandemic planning with regards to H5N1. Dr. Toner is with the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I have referenced articles from this group before. There is a lot of useful information available at the UPMC Biosecurity site, and it is frequently updated.

Dr. Toner talks about how severe a pandemic arising from the H5N1 virus could be, and compares this worst case scenario to the projections commonly used by the CDC flusurge software. In case you are interested in alternative projection models to flusurge, check out the panalysis spreadsheet.


Here is the PDF of the Toner interview

If you would prefer to listen to the audio version the links are here:
Part 1 “What is Avian Flu?” (4:23)
Part 2 “The difference in Death Rate Assumptions” (2:50)
Part 3 “Why we need Hospital Interventions” (6:03)
Part 4 “Why Not Enough is Being Done” (8:40)

You can also go to the Health Business and Policy website directly for the HTML version

Health and Business Policy has more pandemic related interviews available here.

Be aware, most of the information on the Health and Business Policy site seems to be older, from about mid 2006.