Who’s afraid of Bird Flu?

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.

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis of 2003 killed about 800 people out of 8,000 cases and cost regional economies an estimated $18 billion, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The hardest hit were Singa-pore, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia. Travel-related industries were the most severely affected by the disease, which was spread by air passengers from China and Hong Kong.

On the other hand, an avian flu pandemic has the potential to kill millions worldwide and affect all economic sectors. The ADB says in the Asia-Pacific region alone, the economic cost of a bird flu pandemic could exceed $250 billion.

At the moment, the World Health Organization (WHO) says the bird flu threat is still in the third of six phases, with over 60 deaths recorded in Asia since 2003 and rare instances of suspected human-to-human infection.

Phase 6 is the doomsday scenario–the full pandemic phase with sustained human-to-human infection in the general population.

"Phase 3, where we are now, is kind of the warning phase. It’s out there, we know it’s out there, we really have to pay attention. We have to plan," said Dr. Jeffrey Staples, senior medical advisor to emergency services firm International SOS.

"My guess is that at Phase 5, governments will probably impose international travel restrictions," he told AFP in an interview.

"So what this gives us is a window of opportunity where-by we can consider moving people around in Phase 4," he said, referring to the possibility of relocating expatriate corporate staff out of affected countries. "Phase 3 is probably too early to move people, but it’s not too early to think and to start planning in a holistic way."

With the virus now confirmed to have spread into Europe, companies across Asia are preparing emergency plans for a pandemic which it is widely assumed will hit in 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.

Nestlé 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, told AFP 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 the anti-viral drug Tamiflu because in China, people need to go to hospitals and get prescriptions from doctors, Zhang said.

Tian Geng, spokesman for Kodak China in the 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 Indonesia, about 4,500 workers at PT Sierad Produce, an integrated poultry company, are given Vitamin C tablets with their daily meals, said the company’s president director, Eko Putra Sanjoyo.

"Since the outbreak of avian influenza in Indonesia, we have been improving biosecurity aspects in our farms as well as for our workers," Sanjoyo said.

Sierad operates its own feedmills, breeding farms and fast-food restaurants. It also produces chicken nuggets and supplies around 70,000-100,000 slaughtered chickens daily to chains like Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Sanjoyo said he spends around two billion rupiah ($198,000) annually on flu shots for his workers and has installed "backup" teams to replace key corporate officers and farm workers should they be infected with bird flu.

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.

"It’s a fundamentally different virus with a different epidemiological pattern so if it goes pandemic, it will probably spread more quickly and kill more people, and it’s just going to be on a completely different scale than SARS was," Staples said. –AFP