By Dr. Wendy Haines, OMNI Professional Environmental
Who has not heard about avian flu? Avian flu articles have appeared in recent HR magazines, the Harvard Business Review, CFO Journal, numerous news briefs have been posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) Web sites, plus this issue has also appeared on the national news. Recently, a single extended family in Kubu Simbelang village of North Sumatra, Indonesia contracted the H5N1 strain of avian influenza and this caused 7 fatalities. In addition to this number, the Ministry of Health in Indonesia confirmed another 6 cases of human infection with H5N1 avian influenza virus on May 29, 2006. These new cases are not associated with the family cluster and the new number of confirmed H5N1 avian influenza cases is 48 in Indonesia with 36 fatalities. The H5N1 cases in Indonesia have gotten people speculating – is this the launch of a pandemic influenza?
What Every Company Should Know
Every company should know some key facts regarding H5N1 and business continuity. First, flu symptoms normally appear 2 days following initial exposure; however, people are most infectious 24 hours prior to symptoms. Because an employee can come to work one day, interact with their colleagues, and show no signs or symptoms of the flu. The same individual may be out sick the next day and would have spread the flu to the people he or she had interacted with. Therefore, businesses will need to be pro-active with educating their employees about personal hygiene, keeping track of exposures to sick people, and then advising employees to work from home. If every problem presents an opportunity, then the threat of a pandemic will "be an opportunity to repair the perception (often sadly true) that institutions no longer care about individual members," stated Warren G. Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles.
Controlling Fear
The second important fact to remember about H5N1 is that because the overall mortality rate is currently over 50%, fear will be rampant and good communication will be essential. Playing the "wait and see" game regarding a pandemic flu simply does not make good business sense. Businesses will need to disseminate information, early on, regarding key facts about influenza, what you can do to prevent it, what are the signs and symptoms, and the locations of treatment centers. Businesses, local authorities, and care providers need to determine who they should be teaming with to help the surrounding community in the face of a pandemic flu threat.
Risk Management Tea
This leads into another key point: globalization and outsourcing may enhance the spread of the flu, and businesses can be effected much faster than when the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic killed more than 40 million people world wide. This is a key reason why it is critical for businesses to identify a risk management team for pandemic influenza now and add pandemic preparations to their business continuity plans. Nitin Nohara, the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, thinks of the threat of a pandemic as "survival of the adaptive." She suggests that companies need to identify decision makers during a pandemic that are able to apply "new ways of problem solving in an unpredictable and fast-changing environment." As we know, people in the pharmaceutical/biotech industries are highly innovative, they often "think outside the box," and they can trouble shoot problems in real time. These skills will be required for business continuity and adaptation during a pandemic. Another way to think about how to be prepared for a pandemic, is the analogy of marine expeditionary forces, suggested by Nitin in the May 2006 Harvard Business Review. The marines are highly effective in mission critical situations because they not only practice, but everyone on the team can lead the team.
What To Do
Should we be concerned about the threat of a pandemic flu? According to the WHO, we should be identifying pandemic teams, developing plans, and running drills now to ensure preparedness. The WHO has developed a tracking system for the potential warning signs of pandemic flu (see chart). As you can see by the chart, we are currently in Phase 3 of the Pandemic Alert Period - there is a novel influenza strain infecting humans with no or very limited human-to-human spread of the virus.
Now, what portends the novel influenza strain to easily spread from human-to-human? As we all ready know, each year vaccine companies have to make a new influenza vaccine, because of the virus’s ability to mutate. With pandemic influenza, there needs to be a person, or possibly a swine population that is infected with both the novel influenza strain (i.e., H5N1) and a currently circulating human influenza strain. This environment would allow the H5N1 influenza strain to mutate and gain the ability to be spread between people via a cough or a sneeze. Once this threshold is crossed, predictions are that we will quickly move from Phase 4, small clusters of the human influenza cases, to Phase 5, large clusters of human influenza cases with human-to-human spread to the Pandemic Period—Phase 6, sustained transmission of novel influenza strain in general population. As also suggested by the Harvard Business Review, NOW is the time in which companies should develop risk mitigation plans and run practice drills to elucidate any problem areas.
The question I will leave you with the following: Is your company prepared?
This is the first article in a series of 3. The next article will elucidate: How to get prepared for a pandemic
Dr. Wendy Haines is a toxicologist in the TOX Services Business Unit of OMNI Professional Environmental Associates, P.A. She works with a variety of toxicological services including business continuity planning
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