Unit 8Section 2 Exercise 9 Emergency Preparedness

Clinical correlate #4 Medical Emergency Preparedness in the Office

Camus’ novel is based on the cholera epidemic that swept North Africa in the 1840s and killed a large percentage of Oran’s population after French colonization. Read the two excerpts below, as well as a description from the Navy’s historical archives on the disposal of bodies during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

From The Plague, Albert Camus

“At daybreak light breaths of air fan the still empty streets. At this hour, between the night’s victims and the death-agonies of the coming day, it is as if for a while plague stays its hand and takes a breath. All shops are shut. But on some a notice: Closed owing to plague, shows that when the others open presently, these will not. Still half-asleep, the newsboys do not yet cry the news but, lounging at street corners, offer their wares to the lamp-posts, with the vague gestures of sleep-walkers. Soon, awakened by the early street-cars, they will fan out through the town, holding at arm’s length sheets on which the word PLAGUE looms large. Will there be a plague autumn? Professor B. says: ‘No.’ Toll of the 94th day of plague: 124 deaths. In spite of the growing shortage of paper, which has compelled some dailies to reduce their pages, a new paper has been launched: the Plague Chronicle, which set out ‘to inform out townspeople, with scrupulous veracity, of the daily progress or recession of the disease; to supply them with the most authoritative opinions available as to its future course; to offer the hospitality of its columns to all, in whatever walk of life, who wish to join in combating the epidemic; to keep up the morale of the populace; to publish the latest orders issued by the authorities; and to centralize the efforts of all who desire to give active and wholehearted help in the present emergency.’ Actually this newspaper soon came to devote its columns to advertisements of new, ‘infallible’ antidotes against plague.” (p. 118)

“Such were the consequences of the epidemic at its culminating point. Happily it grew no worse, for otherwise, it may well be believed, the resourcefulness of our administration, the competence of our officials, not to mention the burning capacity of our crematorium, would have proved unequal to their tasks. Rieux knew that desperate solutions had been mooted, such as throwing the corpses into the sea, and a picture had risen before him of hideous jetsam lolling in the shadows under the cliffs. He knew, too, that if there was a rise in the death-rate, no organization, however efficient, could stand up to it; that men would die in heaps and corpses rot in the street, whatever the authorities might do, and the town would see in public squares the dying embrace the living in the frenzies of an all too comprehensible hatred or some crazy hope.” (p.179)

From: Personal account by Rear Admiral William B. Caperton of the 1918 Influenza on Armored Cruiser No. 4, USS Pittsburgh, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Those destined for us had been used by others. Much haggling with the cemetery authorities resulted, until finally the army officer in charge of the prisoners detailed eight to dig the graves required by us. These men were of practically no assistance to us and we were finally compelled to dig the graves for our own dead shipmates. Conditions in the cemetery beggared description. Eight hundred bodies in all states of decomposition, and lying about in the cemetery, were awaiting burial. Thousands of buzzards swarmed overhead. In the city itself there were no longer medicines, or wood for coffins and very little food. Rich and poor alike were stricken. In the big public hospital which had the contract for burying the city's dead, hundreds of naked bodies lay thrown upon each other like cord wood and at least one instance was known of a live man being dragged out from the piles. The following day, thanks to the generosity of Mr. F.A. Huntress, the American manager of Rio Light and Power Company, arrangements were made for the proper transportation of those whom it was necessary to inter ashore.

Study Questions

1. How do you think people would respond to, say, an avian flu epidemic? Is society better prepared for a modern epidemic such as avian flu than they were for the plague as depicted by Camus or in the historical account? See ABC News. What would we do with our dead?

2 What can we learn from past epidemics to prepare for the future?

3. How does Camus depict the media response to the plague? How does this compare to how today’s media would handle an epidemic?

4. What does the passage from the Naval Historical website about the influenza epidemic convey about the transmission of illness? How does disease transmission during an epidemic change the ordinary experience of illness?