Several large, influential food companies and organizations contacted by Weekly Briefing had little or nothing to say about their pandemic preparedness plans.
(CIDRAP News) An influenza pandemic as severe as the great flu of 1918 could cost the United States $683 billion and plunge the American economy into the second-deepest recession since World War II, a nonprofit health advocacy group warned today.
Most people think about possible future pandemicswhen they think about them at allwith a good deal of ambivalence. To communicate with ambivalent people, you need to understand the 'risk communication seesaw.'
Weekly Briefing interviewed pandemic preparedness planners from two Fortune 500 companies to find out how they are using exercises and what they are learning. For both, scenarios changed as the exercise progressed. We present one here. Look for the second one in an upcoming article on designing, conducting, and evaluating tabletop exercises.
Exercises—whether simple or complex—can greatly help a business prepare, regardless of its stage of pandemic planning.
Michael Evangelides, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, extracted the following information from three surveys of corporate preparedness conducted in 2005 and 2006 by Deloitte's Center for Health Solutions and Deloitte Consulting with guidance from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). Among the executives he surveyed, Evangelides found:
The pandemic worst case is:
(a) Truly horrific(b) Truly unlikely(c) Truly worth planning for(d) All of the above
The right answer: (d) All of the above.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Sep 11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina have given many senior executives a small taste of the economic devastation that unforeseen localized events can wreak on a company.
Some pandemic influenza preparedness planners start out with an advantage. Their company culture supports disaster preparedness and senior executives have educated themselves on the threator the CEO "has a certain degree of paranoia" as Boyd George, CEO of the Hickory, NCbased grocery supplier Alex Lee, puts it. He had read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic that alarmed him.
We have no grounds for confidence that a severe pandemic is imminent. Our communications shouldn't imply otherwise.
Medical historians tell us there have been nine influenza pandemics in the past 300 years. So one every 30 to 35 years or so, or roughly three per century, is everybody's best guess about the future frequency of influenza pandemics.
