CDC Checklist Helps Companies Plan For Flu Pandemic

Has your company formulated a plan for coping with a flu pandemic?

Preparing for a flu pandemic is a high-priority task at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s primary agency for protecting the health and safety of Americans.

I visited the CDC’s gleaming headquarters campus last week with nine other health-care journalists. We came as part of the Midwest Health Journalism Program fellowship at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. The program is sponsored by the Associationof Health Care Journalists, which is based at the school.

The CDC was founded in 1946 in Atlanta as the Communicable Disease Center. Its role then was to control malaria. In the decades since, its mission has expanded to include the prevention and control of other infectious diseases, chronic conditions, injuries, workplace hazards, disabilities and environmental health threats.

The campus, which is next to Emory University, houses about 4,000 scientists and other health specialists. Many of them spend their time analyzing what could happen if there was a repeat of the global medical disaster that occurred at the end of World War I. That’s when the “Spanish Flu” killed between 20 million and 40 million people, including about 675,000 Americans.

“Our big concern is it will be like 1918 and millions of people will die,” Ralph O’Connor, the CDC’s lead public health advisor, told our group. “It would be a nightmare.”

And it would wrench our lives in ways that we can hardly imagine. Schools would close, and children would have to stay home. Unlike on snow days, the kids wouldn’t be able to go to shopping malls, which would be off limits to everyone. If the children are young, someone would have to stay home from work with them — maybe for a long time.

It’s hard to envision hard-charging, multitasking Americans retreating into this kind of a shadow-world. Yet it’s better than the alternative. O’Connor recalled that during the 1918 pandemic, the city of St. Louis virtually shut down, and the death rate dropped. Around the same time, the bold residents of Philadelphia held a patriotic parade, and flu deaths shot up.

It goes without saying that a flu pandemic would pulverize our economy.

We can’t make our society pandemic-proof, but there are things we can do to blunt the effect. The CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, its parent agency, have created a list of steps that large businesses should take to make it through this potential health catastrophe. They include:

•Identify a pandemic coordinator or team responsible for preparendness and response planning.

•Implement guidelines to modify the frequency and type of face-to-face contact, such as hand-shaking and shared work stations, among employees and between employees and customers.

•Establish policies for a flexible worksite, such as telecommuting and staggered shifts.

•Train and prepare a back-up work force, which may include contractors and retirees.

•Determine the potential effect of a pandemic on the company’s financials using multiple scenarios that would affect different product lines and production sites.

•Establish an emergency communications plan and revise it periodically.

Source