Atlanta: Georgia-10/13/2008

Maintaining Food Supplies During Pandemics

zogger Mon Oct 13 22:06:00 -0700 2008 Science
http://technocrat.net/d/2008/10/13/51768

Researchers at Georgia Tech have been developing models that will help emergency planning authorities and volunteer organizations such as the Red Cross predict in advance when and where and how they would need to focus efforts in order to feed millions of people suddenly cut off from the normal aspects of the just in time" food distribution system during possible large scale pandemics. By combining best case practices as regards quarantines combined with the waves of infections that are most likely to be encountered, they can minimize cost and maximize effectiveness in their pre planing scenarios.

"Running all of these different scenarios has helped us realize that we will have a lot more people to feed in metropolitan Atlanta during a pandemic flu than we imagined. The models have provided us with a realistic idea of where we'll need to locate community food distribution facilities and how many we might need to have given certain assumptions and decisions," said Self. ed.z.: and they could also put as much effort into educating people about the necessity of having a couple of months of simple basic food stockpiled at home as they do in telling people to be sure to get their analog to digital TV converters. One is a hassle if it is not implemented, at most annoying, the other is life and death situation potentially.

Maybe we need a better set of social priorities direction, especially from government. This isn't crying wolf either, having a decent "reserve" at home is just common sense, there are any number of potential scenarios where that reserve could come in quite handy. Hopefully, these new studies and models might help them to break through the "three day's" worth of stores they used to quote, and get that figure bumped up to something more realistic. They look at the logistics and cost, so let's.

They need to reproduce, in an emergency situation, the same sort of situation that exists now with normal JIT supply and delivery, with potentially a lot fewer people being available to do it, with a lot less physical resources, with probably many more breaks and disruptions in the upstream chain, on top of a most severe health problem with a lot of people sick/infected/dying at the same time.

That's a big problem. Really big.

Whereas...having the bulk of the food that would be needed during quarantine already "pre-positioned" in the "distribution centers" where it is needed the most - a well stocked pantry in the individual homes where the folks are who want to be eating - seems a worthy goal. And doing it calmly in advance is a lot easier than running panic zone distributions.

And don't forget the pets!