You know that annoying Bbeeeeeeeeeeep from the TV and radio that is supposed to warn you when something bad is happening??? well turns out its mostly annoying and not really effective.  In an age of blackberries and text messages the basic emergency broadcasting system up to 75 million Americans will not be reached by the system due to lack of accountability and the reluctance to embrace new ways of communication.  Thanks for NPR’s A Way With Words you can read the article below, or CLICK HERE for the pod cast. P.S The Podcast is much more detailed plus you don’t have to use your eyes to read….reading…ha.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has made little progress on an emergency-alert system despite a 2006 executive order that called for improvements in the system in light of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

The system — officially called the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System — also remains “largely unchanged” since a review completed in 2007 by the Government Accountability Office, the GAO’s director of physical infrastructure, Mark L. Goldstein, told lawmakers in prepared remarks.

Even though FEMA has some projects under way, Goldstein said the GAO “found the reliability of a national-level relay system — which would be critical if the president were to issue a national-level alert — remains questionable due to (1) a lack of redundancy, (2) gaps in coverage, (3) a lack of testing and training, and (4) limitations in how alerts are disseminated to the public.”

No Alerts

The original emergency-alert system was put in place during the Cold War. It works on a daisy-chain principle: The government would send out a message to stations in an emergency, and those stations would then transmit that message to stations across the region. If there are problems in the system, however, the message won’t be transmitted, Goldstein told NPR’s Robert Siegel.

Goldstein says the way things stand now, in the event of an emergency many parts of the country will be without information. The GAO has been “very concerned about it,” Goldstein says.

“If there is an emergency, and disaster strikes a major city where there’s part of the emergency-alert system in place, many other stations will never get the alert that’s supposed to be given to them,” he says. “During the day, only about 75 percent of the country would receive an alert; at night, when there’s less interference, it’s about 82 percent.”

FEMA Records

Goldstein says FEMA, which runs the program for the Department of Homeland Security, maintains inadequate records, leaving questions about how much has been spent on the program so far.

“In fact, one of the findings of the report is that nobody really can tell what pilot projects that FEMA put in place actually were completed, what kinds of lessons were learned and whether any information that came out of those pilots were used to improve the system,” he says.

Goldstein acknowledges that perhaps the system needs to be rethought because 90 percent of alerts are issued for weather emergencies. He says the president has never sent out a national alert. But, he says, not all stations follow through when there is an emergency.

“So the question does remain that for … all sorts of risk populations, people with disabilities … or people who don’t speak English that there is not necessarily sufficient capability in the system that everyone’s going to be warned if there needs to be such a warning,” Goldstein says.

HHS is getting the ordering right, with a supplemental order of an additional 29 million doses of the vaccine that defends against H1n1.

In the recent past there had been much concern that the vaccine was being under ordered leaving millions of at risk Americans susceptible to infection.  Most states are on track for a delivery date some time in the next three weeks with the vaccine now told to be a nasal spray and not delivered by injection.

This additional order comes one week after the FDA formally approved the vaccine. The FDA’s announcement means that CSL Limited, MedImmune LLC, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Limited, and Sanofi Pasteur Inc., all have the official go ahead to fulfill the first large round orders of the vaccine.

From the Examiner.com

Contrary to earlier reports saying that it may take two doses of the vaccine to provide the proper immunity to the virus, the FDA confirmed – in its press release – that clinical trials indicate “the 2009 H1N1 vaccines induce a robust immune response in most healthy adults eight to 10 days after a single dose.” They go on to say that the response time is typical of even seasonal flu vaccines.

The drug manufacturer Novartis claimed on September, 3,  that “the study showed a strong, potentially protective, immune response in 80% of subjects after one dose.” MedImmune also claims that its intranasal spray vaccine “prompts the body to begin mounting an immune response after the first dose.”

So there you have it, much of the concern of the execution of this vaccine have been solved over the past week, as more information comes in will be posted here. oink oink.

Its like old Kim Jong Il is at it again: North Korea Launches 4 missiles in 4 hours

These guys keep baby stepping their way to testing an intercontinental missile, lucky for Japan they have an infrastructure dedicated to WTSHTF situations, I guess that is what happens when you live on a rock surrounded by threats.

You better stop buying all that fertilizer and all those guns STAT.. ( to bad my hobbies include gardening and guns…)

The Pentagon announces the development of a data base that will be used to track all consumer purchases to help identify suspicious patters to help fight terrorism.

Read the artical here..