Business Preparedness

How does a global company keep sharp its planning for a disaster that may be long in the making, acute at the onset, months in duration, and bigger in scope than any one-time event?

For Don Ainslie, global security officer at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 2 years of minding avian flu's advance and planning for a human influenza pandemic has presented just such a challenge.

More and more companies are starting to integrate pandemic preparedness into their business continuity programs. That's good news--and helping to facilitate it is one of the reasons this newsletter was launched.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Labor yesterday released revised Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidance to help employers protect their workers from job-related exposure to H5N1 avian influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – Americans are overwhelmingly willing to cut back their activities to help cope with an influenza pandemic, but many worry that they would have money problems if they had to miss as few as 7 days of work, according to a survey from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

(CIDRAP News) – In a major push to modernize and speed the production of vaccines for pandemic influenza and other emerging threats, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week issued new guidance on how to safely and effectively develop new cell-based vaccines.

(CIDRAP News) – Recent tests suggest that an antiviral drug given by intravenous (IV) or intramuscular (IM) injection could eventually serve as another weapon against influenza, according to results presented at a conference last week.

Sept 1, 2006 (CIDRAP News) – The nation's largest public health organization sounded an alarm this week about the public health workforce, citing a current shortage and projecting that the profession could lose up to half of its workers over the next few years.

(CIDRAP News) – Now that most states have issued preliminary or final plans for dealing with pandemic influenza, a group of experts who looked at the public health strategies in the plans has given them a mixed review.

(CIDRAP News) – Two national groups of infectious disease experts urged the White House to make the development of vaccines the most important element in the nation's pandemic influenza plan.