The US Government today released their National Strategy for Pandemic Influence response.

Here is the Presidents letter in regards to Pandemic response and the introduction paragraph to this topic. The full strategy overview can be found here. A pdf version of the complete strategy can be downloaded here.

One very big problem that I see with this response strategy is that the government does not indicate where the funding for such a large scale response would come from. If they are expecting the entire national community to stop going to school and/or work this will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on the national economy. Not to mention the ability for families living paycheck-to-paycheck to survive for extended periods of time.

I do think that it is a good thing that they have learned from the past. That is to say, they seem to realize the impacts of not being prepared for national catastrophes (i.e. Katrina). But it is still very questionable whether or not this response strategy will actually help with 1918 type flu pandemic.