By Peter Wilton
A Pandemic seems likely, but action, not fear, is the best defence.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 was the moment that World War One drew to its bloody conclusion. Every year since, as the clock strikes the eleventh hour on November 11, Canadians pause in remembrance. While it’s important to mark the end of that conflict, we would be wise to remember a far more deadly foe that emerged during the dying days of that distant war; and unlike the guns, bombs and bullets, it is not buried in the mud of northern France. Today, despite all the advances in medicine, influenza pandemics remain just as real a threat as they did nearly 90 years ago.
The influenza pandemic (Spanish Flu) that swept the world in three waves in the last months of 1918 was unique in that young, fit adults between the ages of 20 and 45 were the hardest hit and suffered the highest death toll. By the time the fl u had run its course, between 20 million and 100 million people had died, collectively making up five per cent of the world’s population. To put this in perspective, seven times more people died from the influenza than died in the four years of trench warfare.
Every century there are approximately three fl u pandemics, the last occurring in 1968 when nearly 1,000,000 people died worldwide. While fl u experts do not know when the next pandemic will occur, they know with certainty that it will and they are anxiously watching the Avian Flu (H5N1), fearing that this virus that first crossed from poultry to humans in 1997, has the hallmarks of becoming the next pandemic, and in its present form would outdo the Spanish Flu with a possible death toll as high as 350 million people.
While today we have better medical knowledge and equipment than we did in 1918, we face different sets of challenges than our grandparents. Some of these challenges are as follows: a lack of surge capacity in our hospitals, inability to create a vaccine until the pandemic is underway; air travel which allows the pandemic to spread around the world in days, not months; our economic addiction to debt and just-in-time delivery, which leaves us vulnerable to a severe economic downturn and rapid shortages in the necessities of life.
If the next pandemic targets those between the ages of 20 to 45 years of age, employers could see an absentee rate of 35 per cent or higher. Employees will either be sick themselves, or caring or grieving for loved ones. So how can you prepare your business for the next influenza pandemic? Allison Stuart is the Province of Ontario’s Director of Emergency Management Unit for the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care: “…Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves and our families to be self-reliant or at least reasonably self-reliant in the case of emergency… for a number of weeks… There is layer upon layer that has to be considered when planning for a pandemic. What if the children’s school or daycare is closed— who will look after them? What if you have an elderly relative who depends on Meals on Wheels and this service was no longer available—what would you do… it is important to think of these scenarios and then to plan what to do.”
Every century there are approximately three flu pandemics, the last occurring in 1968 when nearly 1,000,000 people died worldwide.
Businesses should be prepared to last out a crisis that will not be over quickly. Unlike natural disasters, the event is not over in a few minutes, and it will not occur in isolation. Th e pandemic will hit almost simultaneously around the world. In fact, the crisis is predicted to come in three waves of flu—the fi rst wave lasting roughly eight weeks, the second a few months, followed by a third wave. In total, the pandemic will likely last one and a half years.
18 WAYS TO GET READY
Here are some suggestions on how to prepare your business for an influenza pandemic:
Source: pandemicflu.gov – www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/businesschecklist.Html
We Ontarians suffer from collective amnesia when it comes to just how dangerous influenza can be. We often refer to the common cold as “just the flu.” However the flu bug, even in its relatively mild seasonal form, takes the lives of between 500 and 4,500 Canadians each year. Sometimes even the flu is not just the flu. It has adapted into a silent efficient killer known as a pandemic, and we would be wise to put plans into place now before the next pandemic arrives. This should include concrete ways that we as individuals, employers and employees will successfully ride out a pandemic which could take a year and a half to run its course and leave in its wake a death toll as high as 350,000,000 people.
Excerpted from Safety Mosaic, Spring 2006, Vol. 9, No. 1
Check out OSSA's Respiratory & Body Fluids Hazards Workbook for more information.
