The 3 P's and Bird Flu
Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke at Fuqua tonight to talk about Failures of Imagination, Connectivity and Scalability and how it relates to Pandemic Bird Flu (more on that later). Her Duke connection is the Chief Operating Officer of the CDC, Bill Gimson, a Global Exective MBA (GEMBA) from Fuqua. I wish I had thought of this question at the Q&A session after her talk, but it occurred to out me afterwards that I should have asked her what governtment agencies can learn from the business sector and what the business sector can learn from government agencies.
Dr. Gerberding's take home message is that we must remain vigilant about the possiblity of global pandemics, stating that complacency is our greatest enemy. Just as our failure to imagine the possibility of a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 caught us unprepared for an attack, our failure to imagine another global flu pandemic (there have been three global flu pandemics in the last century) could leave us vulnerable to its spread.
By the way, the 3 P's are: pigs, people and poultry. Apparently, many new strains of influenza originate in Asia because people in that region live in close proximity to pigs who are natural reservoirs for poultry and human flu, giving the flu virus the opportunity to recombine and mutate into new forms of the virus. Scary stuff.
Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke at Fuqua tonight to talk about Failures of Imagination, Connectivity and Scalability and how it relates to Pandemic Bird Flu (more on that later). Her Duke connection is the Chief Operating Officer of the CDC, Bill Gimson, a Global Exective MBA (GEMBA) from Fuqua. I wish I had thought of this question at the Q&A session after her talk, but it occurred to out me afterwards that I should have asked her what governtment agencies can learn from the business sector and what the business sector can learn from government agencies.
Dr. Gerberding's take home message is that we must remain vigilant about the possiblity of global pandemics, stating that complacency is our greatest enemy. Just as our failure to imagine the possibility of a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 caught us unprepared for an attack, our failure to imagine another global flu pandemic (there have been three global flu pandemics in the last century) could leave us vulnerable to its spread.
By the way, the 3 P's are: pigs, people and poultry. Apparently, many new strains of influenza originate in Asia because people in that region live in close proximity to pigs who are natural reservoirs for poultry and human flu, giving the flu virus the opportunity to recombine and mutate into new forms of the virus. Scary stuff.
