In this episode 3M’s Global Head of Government Affairs Center of Excellence, Dr. John Pournoor, joins us to discuss pandemics and how we plan for them as a nation so that we are prepared in the event of an outbreak.  A “pandemic” is defined by the Dictionary of Epidemiology as ‘an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people’. Throughout history, there have been a number of pandemics, one of the most devastating pandemics was the Black Death, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in 1350. The most recent pandemics include the HIV pandemic as well as the 1918 and 2009 H1N1 pandemics.