By Frank Stirk

Volunteers cook food in San Jose, California, during the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu catastrophe. Elsewhere on this page are scenes from the 2004 Avian Flu pandemic.

“It would be nice to respond in the affirmative – ‘Sure, we’ll help’ – instead of saying, ‘We’re too scared,’” says Dr. Tim Foggin, a Burnaby family physician and a Christian who sees in this coming crisis an unparalleled opportunity for churches to show the love of Christ in their communities.

Foggin moderates an email group dedicated to helping churches prepare for a pandemic, and  co-authored a new Church Preparedness Checklist with a specific focus on the next pandemic.

Alarm

What has governments, healthcare professionals, scientists and economists so alarmed is that the world could soon experience an avian (H5N1) flu pandemic that would make the death toll from the 2005 tsunami pale by comparison.

“We’re talking 10 times bigger. Two to seven million [deaths] is usually the ballpark figure,” says Foggin.

“What happens in a pandemic is there’s a major [genetic] shift in the virus,” says Dr. Eric Young, B.C.’s deputy provincial health officer. “Our immune systems don’t recognize that because it’s new. That’s why there’s no immunity developed in the population.”

“The saving grace so far,” he adds, “has been that the H5N1 strain hasn’t been easily spread from person to person. But it’s been pretty virulent when it has gotten into a person. The mortality rate’s been pretty high.”

For several centuries now, flu pandemics have broken out every 10 to 40 years with varying degrees of virulence. Some, as in 1957 and 1968, can be relatively minor, and pose about the same threat as the annual flu outbreak.

But others can be extremely dangerous – the most recent being the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918 -19 which claimed somewhere between 20 and 40 million lives worldwide, including 50,000 in Canada.

Waves

And unlike other natural disasters, pandemics can typically last more than a year, striking in waves sometimes months apart. Each wave can last upwards of six to eight weeks, affecting an estimated 15 to 35 per cent of the population to some degree.

The social impact would be devastating. Ottawa Public Health, for instance, estimates that if 25 per cent of the city’s population was affected and the pandemic lasted seven weeks, there could be roughly 30,000 new cases, 16,000 people seeking medical assessment, 350 hospitalization and 80 deaths each week of the crisis.

In the Greater Vancouver area, says Foggin, “one local hospital is looking at having one-third of the staff off sick or [at home] caring for the sick, and one-third redistributed in the communities. Now they’re down to one-third of their usual staffing – and expecting, by conservative modeling, a five-times increase in patient load.”

No segment of society would be immune, as thousands of workers book off sick, schools are closed, the movement of people and goods is disrupted, and so on. As well, says Anglican Canon Douglas Graydon, who chairs a tri-diocesan working group on pandemic preparedness in southern Ontario: “It would be so comprehensively global there might not necessarily be resources that can come into your community from outside.”

Standing in the gap

It is in this gap that churches are being encouraged to stand. “Faith-based communities can actually do quite a bit,” says Young.

“Some people may be ill in the home without anyone really knowing about it . . . so helping to keep an eye on your neighbour is going to be a really important thing during a pandemic. Some people will need services that are generally provided in regular times like Meals on Wheels.”

The opportunities to serve can be as varied as the needs that arise, as long as stringent rules of personal hygiene (such as frequent hand-washing) and the prohibitions on physical contact (such as giving someone a hug) are adhered to.  

“Try to think outside of the box,” Foggin advises. “I don’t expect this to be crystallized or formalized before anything happens. But if we can have a framework or foundation set, then there’ll be something that can be ramped up fairly quickly.”

Churches that do get involved, he adds, also need to let their municipalities know their intentions “just to have that dialogue, [keep] those channels of communication open.”

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Template

A template for pandemic preparedness that Graydon’s working group has developed and offered to every Anglican diocese seeks to remind them that, as he says, part of every Christian’s calling is “to be servants . . . to embrace risk and to minister during times of anxiety, confusion and catastrophes.”

Also included, says Graydon, “is a checklist that parishes, dioceses, actually just about anybody, is encouraged to think their way through, which should begin to answer . . . how do I go about getting ready for such an event and what do I need to do next.”

“What I would hope for,” says Foggin, “is in the major urban centres particularly that there’d be a handful of churches that can start interacting more intentionally along these lines and thinking this through and making some initial plans.”

Yet so far, it seems most churches remain skeptical.

“I have gotten comments about how we’re just not really sure we believe this is a legitimate concern,” says Graydon.

They are not alone. Some critics, such as American science journalist Michael Fumento, writing in the National Post  in April 2006, argue that the whole idea of an impending global pandemic betrays “sheer ignorance of how viruses change.

“There’s no evidence H5N1 is mutating toward becoming transmissible between humans. . . . Rather, as one mutation draws the virus closer to human transmissibility, another is as likely to draw it farther away.”

False fears?

Fumento warns: “The false fears we sow today we shall reap in the future as public complacency if a monster truly appears at the door.”

While obviously not questioning the imminent threat of a pandemic, Young is nonetheless confident that B.C., at least, “will be very well prepared” when it does strike.

“The indications are,” he says, “that the antivirals for influenza that we do have may well work to some extent in a pandemic, even if the virus changes. So there is the possibility that we’ll have a couple of antivirals that will work.”

In addition, Canada will have a guaranteed supply of antivirals thanks to its ability to produce and stockpile the drugs, says Young. “We will be one of the few self-sufficient countries to be able to do that.”

And even if the skeptics are proven right – or even if the pandemic turns out to be not as disastrous as many fear it will be – Graydon believes it still makes good common sense for churches to have some plans in place in the event of an emergency.

“Let’s look upon this preparedness as part of our community ministry,” he says, “so that if the parish really wants to embrace something like this, they can be known within their community as a Christian community that’s there and available and ready to help out in times of need.”

Leadership

Avian Flu microbes.

“Hopefully, we can work from the top down,” he says. “Bottom up, we need to sort of do the publicity and raise the awareness of people at the grassroots level. But in terms of actual preparedness plans and their implementation, we’ll have to depend on the people at the top.”

Toward that end, CMU will be hosting a Summit June 20 – 21 in partnership with the International Centre for Infectious Diseases, a federal agency based in Winnipeg, on how faith communities can effectively respond to a pandemic.

“We’re expecting to get the top people in each denomination here. It’s not wide open to the public,” says Klassen.

Whether top-down or bottom-up, what matters for Foggin is that churches seize the challenge.

“If the church doesn’t stand up, it’s going to prove itself irrelevant, as many think it is, unfortunately. But if the church does stand up, there is such great potential.”

In contrast to the tsunami that caught everyone off-guard, he says, no one – including churches – will have any excuse for not being ready when the next pandemic sweeps across the globe. “We’ve seen the wave. It’s coming slowly and we have time to prepare. But then at the end, it comes real fast.”

“The analogy I use here in Manitoba is of the Red River Valley flood,” says Klassen.

“I mean, people know there have been floods in the past and there definitely will be floods in the future. We just don’t know when and how severe. So we prepare for the worst case.”

However, he said, referring to the pandemic: “In this case, it’s like there’s six feet of snow in North Dakota waiting to come down on us.”

June 2007