The chances that Rhode Island will see an avian flu pandemic, Dr. L. Anthony Cirillo told business leaders at a recent seminar, are about 50-50. But “there’s a 100-percent chance,” he added, that “we will see a pandemic flu.”
The difference is not academic, said Cirillo, who is medical director of public health emergency preparedness at the R.I. Department of Health. Experts now believe the bird flu will arrive here in the fall, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will result in a pandemic.
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For many people, just hearing the words “avian flu” can be scary these days. The fear, fueled by many news reports, is that when the flu virus reaches the United States, it will spread and create a pandemic of proportions worse than those of the global influenza pandemic of 1918.
In the two years since the World Health Organization first documented the presence of the virus in humans, it has been found in China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey, according to the WHO. There have been cases of multiple animals getting sick, though so far, there is no evidence of human-to-human transfer.
As the virus moves closer to America, however, public health leaders have begun to prepare for the worst. To help businesses do the same, the Tech Collective organized a seminar on April 7 at the Radisson Airport Hotel in Warwick, with expert assistance from Marsh. About 100 representatives from information technology and biotech companies, universities and hospitals attended.
Cirillo, the keynote speaker, said there’s no question that the avian flu virus is coming.
European and Asian birds fly north to Greenland and Iceland for the summer and so do New England’s birds, therefore presenting an opportunity for the virus to spread, he said.
“The challenge with avian influenza is it started in one bird somewhere,” Cirillo said, “and now it’s in hundreds of millions.” Each infected bird, he added, creates an opportunity for the virus to mutate from one that doesn’t go from human to human, to one that does.
Cirillo said a bird flu pandemic would be an incredible threat compared with previous pandemics because of its high potential mortality rate – 50 percent, compared with 2 or 3 percent for the pandemic Spanish flu of 1918.
“If the mortality rate stays this high, we’re going to see societal disruption like know one has even thought of,” he said. “Medical supplies will be inadequate … staffing is going to be an issue.”
About 30 percent of people are going to get sick in the event of a pandemic, Cirillo said, which means in a state like Rhode Island, with 1 million residents, about 300,000 might get infected, with about half getting sick enough to seek medical care within an eight-week period.
“I will tell you we have challenges every day meeting the demand for health care in the state,” he said. “Adding another 150,000 people over eight weeks … will be very, very challenging.”
A pandemic flu will provide its share of problems for employers as well, Cirillo said.
Businesses must prepare to meet the challenge of how they will remain in operation should half their work force be affected, either by direct infection or taking care of family members – and they need to do so in the context of government emergency plans.
“Whatever you do in terms of continuity of operations and planning how your business is going to be maintained,” he said, “it has to be in conjunction with the overall plan for how the federal government and the state are going to respond.”
Marsh senior consultant John Edgar said a systematic approach is essential for a good emergency plan.
“We go through the planning committee and threat assessment,” he said. “We ask, what are our local resources? How much are we going to do ourselves? How much can we rely on external agencies? And then we start to assemble our team. We write the specific procedures. We go and train our personnel and exercise the plan.”
Plans also need to be updated continually updates to keep up with changing circumstances, Edgar said. And practice is paramount.
“So often emergencies don’t follow a script,” Edgar said. “So we need to be able to understand the general principles of our emergency management plans and our procedures so that we can then, at times of crisis, exercise the leadership that’s important. And the way you do that is through practice.”
