Companies across Asia brace for bird flu catastrophe

Singapore – Just two years after the SARS outbreak sent Asian economies into intensive care, companies across the region are bracing themselves for the vastly more malignant threat of a bird flu pandemic.

With the virus now confirmed to have spread into Europe, companies across Asia are preparing emergency plans for a pandemic which is widely assumed to be only a matter of time.

Contingency measures ranging from free Vitamin C pills for workers and taking poultry off the canteen menu to costly evacuation plans for expatriate staff and their families are being drafted by companies.

Nestle Malaysia said it was in the process of drafting a bird flu contingency plan, with guidance from local authorities and its headquarters in Switzerland.

Shell Malaysia said the group’s "contingency planning, initially in some 50 countries, is well advanced."

In China, Charles Zhang, public relations manager of Procter and Gamble in the southern province of Guangzhou, said all staff had been urged to "pay attention to their personal health and bird flu prevention measures."

Procter and Gamble, which has 5,000 employees in China, one percent of them expatriates, is not stockpiling masks or shoe gloves and so far has no alternate plans for transport in case supply chains become bottled up.

There are no evacuation plans at the moment. Neither does the group have any stocks of anti-viral drug Tamiflu because in China, people needed to go to hospitals and get prescriptions from doctors, Zhang said.

Tian Geng, spokesman for Kodak China in southeastern city of Xiamen, said the company has a special department "which has done a lot of work during SARS and has special medical knowledge."

In Vietnam, where most of the bird flu deaths have been reported, a human resources official of Toyota, which employs 800 people in Vinh Phuc province, said that in 2003, "we published a prevention manual that was used during the SARS epidemic, and it is still effective now."

"We provided workers with masks, antiseptic mouthwash, nose drops and ordinary flu tablets. We sterilized our plant regularly. During the epidemic, workers entering the workplace must pass a sterilized carpet at the entrance. At present we have excluded poultry and poultry products from our menu."

Medical advisor Staples of International SOS said that "multinational corporations are still struggling to understand the full scope of a pandemic and the full threat to business continuity."

"Think of it just as a matter of scale. SARS killed about 800 people and the numbers the WHO is throwing out (for bird flu) are in the millions, possibly more. Just on that level, it’s several orders of magnitude greater." – AFP