US firms wrestle with bird flu plans
NST, 9 May 2006

NEW YORK: Worrying how to cope if bird flu becomes a pandemic, US companies are making contingency plans from telecommuting to letting workers sleep on the job.

Companies are struggling to design ways to combat what could be a highly infectious disease and make a third of the population sick, experts say. As many as 40 per cent of workers could stay home during the peak of a pandemic wave, they say.

“There are those professionals saying nothing is going to happen, and there are those who are saying this is going to be bad”, said Jack McKlveen, risk management manager at United Parcel Services Inc. “You have to take that spectrum and plan across all scenarios, as you don’t know which one is going to occur”.

The Atlanta-based company with 407,000 employees is making plans for telecommuting, staggered shifts and purchasing huge quantities of hand sanitizer. Also, teaching employees how to prevent the spread of the disease was key, he said.

Companies face an array of potential problems, from employees staying home sick to employees coming to work sick, an overload of infrastructure due to telecommuting and supply shortages, said Beth Maldin, an associate at the Centre for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre.

“We’re a “just-in-time” society, and people aren’t keeping stockpiles of goods”, she said. “We need to think of all the interdependencies”.

Among those making plans is Nypro Inc, of Clinton, Massachusetts, which learned its lesson during the SARS scare, spokesman Al Cotton said.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003 killed about 800 people, crippling air travel and tourism and causing billions of dollars of losses.

To deal with SARS, the plastic molding company, with about 8,000 employees in China, ran skeletal staff, staggered shifts and closed its cafeteria, Cotton said. --- Reuters.