University of Wisconsin assistant professor Donald Moynihan recently released a report on avian flu entitled "Leveraging Collaborative Networks in Infrequent Emergency Situations."

According to Moynihan, the report details effective ways to handle emergency situations, such as a bird flu epidemic. Moynihan said he compiled research from an outbreak of a virus affecting birds called Newcastle Disease and analyzed how authorities responded to the outbreak. Newcastle Disease differs from the H5N1 strain of bird flu that has spurred fears of a global pandemic in recent months.

"I did [the] report [because] the current bird flu scare really became sort of a widespread topic of discussion," Moynihan said. "Concerns about bird flu have been around for a couple of years now, with concern about its transfer to human populations. Early last year I wanted to look at an example of emergency response dealing with virulent animal disease and those sorts of examples are hard to come by because they're pretty rare."

Moynihan said Newcastle Disease spread throughout California in 2002 because of the huge commercial chicken and poultry farms as well as the cockfights taking place in the state.

Examining the government's reaction to the outbreak of Newcastle Disease, Moynihan said his report outlines ideas for potential emergency responses to a similar situation.

"There were a couple of factors that I took from the [research], such as the importance of pre-planning and working together once the outbreak took place," Moynihan said.

"Basically at cock fights you have birds interacting with one another and traveling long distances to get to the fights and dealing in unsanitary conditions, so there's a very high potential for transmission in those types of conditions," Moynihan said.

According to Moynihan, there was a significant difference between the response by the state and federal governments during the Newcastle Disease epidemic and other emergency responses.

"What happened was the state and the federal responders basically set up what they called the unified command, where they were working together hand in hand, really emphasizing teamwork in a way, for example, that we didn't see in response to Hurricane Katrina," Moynihan said.

Dennis Dresang, a professor in UW's Lafollette School of Public Affairs, who also studies emergency responses and terrorism preparation in Wisconsin, said it is essential in emergency response situations for organizations involved to communicate.

"I think that communication is really key … communication to the public and making sure that there is a way of letting people know what they should do and what they should not do, where they could go to get a vaccine if that's necessary, and if there's a quarantine what the quarantine is," Dresang said.

According to Dresang, failures in emergency response techniques are due to failures in communication.

"One of the things that has happened in the past whether we're talking about Sept. 11 or Hurricane Katrina or other kinds of emergencies is that we have incompatible communication within these various agencies," Dresang said. "For example the police are not always communicated with effectively, and public health and fire departments have to play a role."

Moynihan said another reason the response to the Newcastle Disease was more effective was due to effective preplanning on the part of officials.

"They had been preplanning for these sort of exotic animal diseases in California, which involved people from the state and federal governments," Moynihan said. "The preplanning was kind of vague, but at the same time even though it didn't provide a specific blueprint for any one disease, it provided the key contacts necessary … so they were familiar with each other."