DW-World.de
Deutsche Welle

We talk of a pandemic when an infectious disease spreads not only from country to country but also from one continent to another. Epidemics that claim millions of lives are nothing new. Europe has been struck by the plague many times in its history. Between 1918 and 1920 over 25 million people died from the Spanish Flu. And in 1968 the Hong Kong Flu was responsible for almost a million deaths. AIDS is also a pandemic, and world-wide phenomena like bird flu give justified cause for concern.

But how could we react in future if an unknown virus attacked mankind and spread at lightning speed?

With this question in mind, a nation-wide disaster control exercise has just taken place in Germany. It showed that within the space of a month a civilized society could be on the brink of collapse. Food would become scarce. The police and the emergency services would only be operational on a limited basis. Crime would rise unchecked. Schools and kindergartens would have to close. And every hospital would be hopelessly overcrowded. Before a remedy could be found, hundreds of thousands would die. And even then there would not be enough vaccine for everyone.

Pastoral workers from the German Lutheran Church who specialize in emergencies also took part in the pandemic exercise. A workshop assessed which services would take priority if a third of the population was incapacitated. Hans-Lothar Hölscher is a priest who has also been specially trained to provide pastoral care in extreme situations. For over ten years he has been on call day and night. He knows exactly what to do when a serious accident has occurred: how to look after the victims, their families, and also those helping at the scene. But the assumptions he encountered at the disaster control exercise have worried him. Civilised behaviour, this experienced pastoral worker fears, could evaporate very quickly and give way to a chaotic battle for survival.