News
By Cait Speaker
|
April 5, 2007
If an influenza pandemic were to break out in Charlottesville, it could potentially kill 170 people per week of the 210,000 inhabitants of the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
This risk prompted the University to create the Pandemic Planning Committee in June 2006, which aims to combat the University's lack of preparation for a potential pandemic, said Committee Chair James Turner, who also serves as the director of Student Health.
According to Turner, the Committee consists of eight subcommittees, each focused on a different aspect of University life: academic affairs, student support services, human resources, communication, administrative operations, healthcare and infection control, information technology and faculty and staff.
"The impact of a pandemic on the University will be widespread across virtually all disciplines, and in order for the University to provide appropriate healthcare services, it's going to take an extraordinary amount of planning," Turner said.
The Pandemic Planning Committee is part of a group of Charlottesville subcommittees that all work together to plan measures that would be necessary in the event of a pandemic, according to Lilian Peake, director of the Thomas Jefferson Health District and head of the Charlottesville pandemic planning subcommittees.
Peake and Turner both agreed the threat of a pandemic is very real and according to Turner, the University is at an especially high risk.
"We have hundreds and hundreds of faculty and students traveling internationally, so we are quite vulnerable to a pandemic -- if there's a pandemic it will most certainly hit Charlottesville," Turner said.
In response to this possibility, the University's Pandemic Planning Committee has developed a plan to work with the University's existing emergency response plan that evolved after Sept.