Pandemics: I'm scared . . . just watched Laurie Garrett presentation on TED . . . we're screwed.

I just finished watching Laurie Garrett give a presentation about pandemics. She talks about Tamiflu, pandemics, airplane travel, and more.

I'm trying to imagine how Korea would deal with the Swine Flu (or SARS human to human, etc) if, and when, it comes here in large numbers . . . my imagination is currently producing similar scenarios found in . . .

Anyways, I posted the links below some of the other presentations that are also about viruses and pandemics.

J

Laurie Garrett: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?

In 2007, as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," gave this powerful talk to a small TED University audience. Her insights from past pandemics are suddenly more relevant than ever.

Filmed 2007, posted in April of 2009

Pulitzer winner Laurie Garrett studies global health and disease prevention. Her books include "The Coming Plague" and "Betrayal of Trust," about the crisis in global public health.

Laurie Garrett: Science journalist

Pulitzer winner Laurie Garrett studies global health and disease prevention. Her books include "The Coming Plague" and "Betrayal of Trust," about the crisis in global public health.

Laurie Garrett has made a career of uncovering science and policy news that is almost too depressing to know: emerging and re-emerging diseases, and the world's general inability to deal with them. In the process, she has uncovered gaping lapses in public health and policy.

Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. As a science writer for Newsday, Garrett won a Pulitzer, a Peabody and two Polk awards; in 2004, she joined the Council on Foreign Relations as Senior Fellow for Global Health. She is an expert on public health -- and the fascinating ways that health policy affects foreign policy and national security.

Wikipedia's entry on Laurie Garrett.

• The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (Penguin; 1995) ISBN 0-1402-5091-3

  discusses the vulnerability of the world to disease due to the lack of attention and funding given to health.

  
  

• Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Hyperion; 2001) ISBN 0-7868-8440-1

Larry Brilliant: TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic

Accepting the 2006 TED Prize, Dr. Larry Brilliant talks about how smallpox was eradicated from the planet, and calls for a new global system that can identify and contain pandemics before they spread.

Nathan Wolfe: A jungle search for the next pandemic virus

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering deadly new viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.