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Guide Urges Tiered Flu Oubreak Response
Keeping society functioning normally as long as possible diminishes a pandemic's economic fallout, and minimizes unintended consequences of infection-control steps. Closing schools means adults lose work to care for children and does not help if older kids sneeze on each other at the mall.
"The challenge to this (taking such steps) is finding the sweet spot of when to turn this on and turning this off," Dr. Martin Cetron, head of CDC's quarantine division, said Wednesday in Atlanta as agency scientists conducted a drill to practice how they would respond to a bird-flu outbreak.
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The question is how well CDC will be able to judge the severity of a newly brewing pandemic _ and then whether states and a worried public believe predictions that it will not be too severe, Levi said.
Federal officials are "concerned about pulling the trigger too fast" on these measures, he said.
Some states were developing similar tiered approaches, said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, a former New York City health commissioner who now directs public health at the State University of New York-Downstate Medical Center.
Thursday's document "elevates to a national level guidelines that can be used everywhere in the country," he said.
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