Planning for the Next Disaster: Pandemic

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Planning for the Next Disaster: Pandemic

Emergency Preparedness

Planning for the Next Disaster: Pandemic

1/11/2008

By Doug Gale

Last month I wrote about a rather exotic low-probability but high-damage event that would have impact on a national scale: an electromagnetic pulse generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion. Such an event would damage things, things like computers that are at the heart of our complex information economy. But what about an event that leaves physical things such as routers undamaged but attacks the human element of our infrastructure on a global scale. Specifically, what happens if a lot of people around the world get sick at the same time?

In the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, somewhere between 30 million and 50 million people died worldwide. In the United States, an estimated 675,000 died, and the mortality rate was 2.5 percent. Health services were overwhelmed as people sought medical treatment. Absenteeism surged, interrupting essential services, such as law enforcement, transportation, and communications.

But that was then; this is now. Surely we are better prepared to deal with a flu bug with all our modern medical technology--or maybe not. The influenza virus spreads very rapidly by coughing or sneezing, and infected people can share the virus before symptoms appear. Although the migration from small family farms to cities had begun, in 1918 roughly one out of every two Americans still lived in a rural location. Few Americans owned cars, and travel was relatively limited, further slowing the spread of the virus.

Today’s world is based on closely interrelated and interdependent systems of trade and commerce. According to Ken McGee, Gartner Inc. vice president and research fellow, 8 percent of the human race, about 500 million people, cross national borders every year. That translates to a staggering 1.4 million people crossing a national border every day! McGee further warns that if the pandemic spreads across the globe as quickly as some experts predict, worldwide social and economic disruptions will follow as governments across the globe enact quarantines that could last one to 12 weeks.

A Pandemic Influenza Primer
Influenza is viral illness; it becomes pandemic when it is found in a large part of the population and affects people in many different countries. According to the World Health Organization, an influenza pandemic can start when three conditions are met:

A new influenza virus subtype emerges for which the human immune system has no pre-existing immunity;
The virus causes serious illness in humans; and
The new virus spreads easily between humans by coughing and sneezing.

There have been at least three influenza pandemics in the last century: the “Spanish influenza” in 1918, the “Asian influenza” in 1957, and the “Hong Kong influenza” in 1968.