[canada.com] An intensive care doctor speaking Wednesday at a conference on the H1N1 pandemic said the virus is the “most frightening” thing he has seen in his career — and other experts here warned that hospitals are not yet ready for a surge of severely sick patients.
In an interview just prior to his address, Dr. [...]

A third man has died of pneumonic plague in north-western China where a town of more than 10,000 people has been sealed off, officials say.

 
[BBC] The 64-year-old man was a neighbor of the first two people to die from the plague in Ziketan in Qinghai Province.
Police have set up checkpoints around Ziketan, as medics are [...]

[WSJ] A scramble among wealthy nations to guard against a swine-flu pandemic is raising concerns that billions of people in poorer countries could be left without adequate supplies of vaccine.
An increasing number of Western countries are signing agreements with vaccine makers guaranteeing them a certain number of doses should a pandemic occur. By locking up the [...]

[NYTimes] “Wash your hands when you shake hands; cover your mouth when you cough,” President Obama urged us at last Wednesday’s news conference when discussing the swine flu. “I know it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference. If you are sick, stay home. If your child is sick, keep them out of school. [...]

 [AP] BERLIN – The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the swine flu outbreak is moving closer to becoming a pandemic, as the United States reported the first swine flu death outside of Mexico, and Germany and Austria became latest European nations hit by the disease.
In Geneva, WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji Fukuda told reporters [...]

Given the current swine flu scare both domestically in New York City and globally, I am reposting my below article written about a year ago.  —
The necessity of bioethics training for hospital emergency preparedness, particularly triage and resource allocation ethics, was recently emphasized by the NY Times.  Bioethics International has been working with hospitals, the AMA and [...]

[AP] MEXICO CITY – A unique strain of swine flu is the suspected killer of dozens of people in Mexico, where authorities closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters in the capital on Friday to try to contain an outbreak that has spurred concerns of a global flu epidemic.
The worrisome new virus — which combines genetic [...]

A physician task force recently proposed guidelines for hospitals to follow in the face of a medical crisis.  The recommendations made by the doctors describe the characteristics of patients who should be denied treatment in order to save those who are more likely to survive.These physicians are concerned with the possibility of a flu pandemic, [...]

The New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster demonstrated the urgency not only of expanding the nation’s medical disaster preparedness and response plans, but it also highlighted the necessity of incorporating an ethical framework to guide decision-making into existing and emerging preparedness programs and policies. 
Hurricane Katrina stranded New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center in ten feet of [...]

The growing number and severity of natural disasters, especially in Asia, make it timely for governments to take a hard look at how to improve their national response. Just as there are scales for measuring the intensity of earthquakes and other disasters so should there be performance standards for measuring how governments respond. Without them, [...]