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.
t's been a busy 10 days on the H5N1 front. Indonesia reported two new human cases and Egypt reported one new human case; there are new confirmed poultry outbreaks in South Korea, Pakistan.
(CIDRAP News) The US Department of Labor (DOL) has introduced workplace health guidelines to help businesses understand their pandemic influenza risks and what they need to do to prepare.
(CIDRAP News) Predictions and observations at this week's conference on business preparedness for pandemic influenza ran the gamut from how fast a pandemic would circle the globe to how well the Internet would hold up, with many topics in between.
(CIDRAP News) Orlando, FL As businesses develop pandemic preparedness plans, they need to cut through a "fog" of uncertainty about exactly what pandemic influenza will look like and how their companies will be able to respond to it, infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, said at a summit in Orlando Monday.
