Maybe Food Trucks Are the Answer?
Crowd sourcing solutions for mass prophylaxis
How do you serve 1 million people a course of antibiotics in 48 hours or less? This is the question that many emergency planners face when they develop what is called the Cities Readiness Initiative Plan (CRI). In the event there is a biological attack upon the United States there are caches of millions of doses of antibiotics warehoused and ready to be delivered to the nation’s largest metropolitan statistical areas. This is the easy part. Once the drugs arrive in these densely populated areas the real challenge is distributing them to the population.
For the purposes of this post, the number of households for a population of 1 million roughly equates to a 1/3 or 333,333 households. In theory, only one member of the household needs to be presented with the antibiotics needed to prevent or lessen the affects of the biological agent for the whole family. While not 1 million it still presents a challenge, particularly within the 48 hour time frame needed for the medications to be effective.
Traditional plans call for a “pull” method where the public comes to a point of distribution (POD) to receive the medication. Traffic congestion, security, staffing and logistics are all obstacles that hinder POD based plans. For example, if planning a drive through proposal for a POD, a queue of 1,000 vehicles is just under four miles long. Try keeping people from cutting that line!
“Push” methods are essentially delivery methods. Some proposals consider using the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the antibiotics to every household in the affected area. However, the inflated value of the antibiotics under these circumstances makes them extremely valuable and a legitimate security concern for the letter carriers that needs to be addressed.
For every proposal there are advantages and disadvantages. Special needs populations may not be able to get to a POD in a pull method. In a push method, how many doses to you deliver per household without be wasteful or providing too few to be efficient? Time is a critical factor that hampers each method.
So how would you solve this problem? Maybe food trucks are the answer?
