Storytelling is a natural in heath and healing, as I’ve blogged about previously. Narrative medicine is also a growing field.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is trying to prevent the complacency that CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding calls “enemy number one when it comes to preparing for another influenza pandemic.”

The CDC has produced the Pandemic Influenza Storybook, for which the agency says the need became evident “as the CDC conducted Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) throughout the country for public-health professionals involved with a variety of emergency response communications activities.”

The storybook is a resource tool … that contains narratives from survivors, families, and friends who lived through the 1918 and 1957 pandemics. Additionally, stories from the 1968 pandemic will be added to this resource as they become available.

Says Gerberding: “These stories, told so eloquently by survivors, family members, and friends from past pandemics, serve as a sobering reminder of the devastating impact that influenza can have and reading them is a must for anyone involved in public-health preparedness.”

Says the CDC:

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than 50 million people worldwide including an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, and it is one of the touchstones for today’s public health preparedness initiatives. To put it in perspective, that’s more people than all those who died (both military personnel and civilians) during World War I (1914-1918). The 1957 Influenza Pandemic caused at least 70,000 U.S. deaths and 1-2 million deaths worldwide. Improvements in scientific technology made it possible to more quickly identify that pandemic when compared with the 1918 event. These first-person and family accounts contained herein provide an intimate, personal view of the 1918 and 1957 pandemics that goes beyond the staggering statistics associated with those events and, therefore, can help planners re-energize their efforts and fight preparedness fatigue and apathy. The Pandemic Influenza Storybook is not a closed book; CDC will continue to accept stories and add them to the book at quarterly intervals.