Risk Managers Urged To Plan for Pandemic

It's not a question of if a pandemic will happen, but a question of where and when, said Michael Osterholm, director for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Osterholm was the keynote speaker April 30 at the RIMS annual conference in New Orleans. He urged risk managers to take the lead in planning how to respond to a pandemic for their companies, their communities and their families.

The risk of a flu pandemic spreading across the globe is greater today than it was in 1918, when a deadly flu killed about a half million people in the United States alone.

Osterholm said with improved transportation, diseases can be spread through airplane travelers very quickly.

Also, while some argue that improved medical technology would help prevent a flu pandemic from taking so many lives, Osterholm said there's a shortage of hospital beds and medical staff personnel.

For instance, there are only 105,000 ventilators in U.S. hospitals, which tend to keep a two-day supply of oxygen on hand, Osterholm said. "We'd run out of oxygen before we ran out of ventilators," Osterholm said.

In addition to the medical system being overwhelmed, Osterholm said, communities would have to find a way to manage the number of corpses.

"We'd run out of caskets overnight," Osterholm said. "Most communities don't have plans."
And a pandemic would also have tremendous economic ramifications. In the recent SARS outbreak, 80% of flights into and out of Hong Kong were canceled for 10 weeks.