When bird flu hits
Many companies have not made plans for dealing with a pandemic, but keeping workers healthy and businesses running will take preparation.
Monday, June 26, 2006

Janet H. Cho
Plain Dealer Reporter

Westfield Insurance has about 100 employees who brainstorm all the disasters that could befall their company, then draw up a plan to address each scenario. Of those, about 15 employees focus specifically on the threat of a worldwide outbreak of avian flu.

What is your company doing?

If you're like most businesses, you've heard of bird flu but haven't given it much thought.

A Deloitte & Touche survey of more than 100 executives in January found that two-thirds had done virtually nothing to prepare for a pandemic. Most companies didn't even have a coordinator.

Big mistake, say business continuity experts.

Most health experts believe that a global flu outbreak of some kind is virtually certain to occur again at some point. The deadly "Spanish flu" of 1918-19 killed more than 50 million people and was the most devastating infectious disease ever recorded.

"It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus -- most likely [a strain called] H5N1 -- acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza," Dr. Lee Jong-wook, the now-deceased director general of the U.N. World Health Organization, told a WHO meeting on avian flu and human flu pandemic in November.

"We don't know when this will happen. But we do know that it will happen."

Not only would many companies be paralyzed by such an illness -- experts warn that up to 40 percent of your work force could be out of commission for weeks at a time -- but businesses would also play a key role in how the virus travels around the world.

"Employers will be on the front line of any outbreak, since business travel and workplaces are major factors in the spread of any virus," said John A. Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a global outplacement firm.


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