Atchoo-Swineflu

One of my responsibilities at work (I work for an insurance company, please don't hate me for that) is helping with Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning.


I fell into this role not by choice, but because I work in a support function in the department and my boss looks after BCP.


Like all risk assessment-type work it feels very much like we're the harbingers of doom because we spend most of our time imagining all the things that can go wrong. That's quite odd for me because, as a rule, I have a bit of a Pollyanna attitude to life.

Before you dismiss this work as pointless, you need to remember that if we can't work, we can't meet our obligations to customers by paying their claims. Not only that, the FSA require us to have BCP covered.

Anyhoo...this week has seen the not-terribly-well-named Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico, and the possibility it might go pandemic float right to the top of BCP agenda.

Thus I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the subject.

Almost everyone seems to be falling into two camps:

The school of impending apocalypse and pestilence

and

The school of I'm ignoring you because this is like the little boy who cried 'wolf'

This was demonstrated beautifully this morning on the Today programme with a "debate" between Simon Jenkins and Professor John Oxford.

The good professor has been cropping up and commenting in lots of places and, as qualified as I'm sure he is, the only message I seem to hear from him is "I'd be really worried if this were avian flu" (see about halfway down)

Isn't that excatly the sort of thing that will likely fuel further panic?

On the other hand Simon Jenkins, whose writing I usually really like, came across as a Dawkins-esque fundamentalist this morning. On the page it sounds more reasonable but still, it's a bit of a shrill cry to that it won't happen because it hasn't happened before. That's just shoddy deductive reasoning IMHO.

Surely, the sensible thing to do is quietly take reasonable precautions.

If it spreads quickly then places of work and education will have problems with a peak of people being unable to come to them due to illness. That will have a disruptive effect.

Therefore, it seems like a good idea to remind people not to come to work if they are genuinely ill and not to go to their doctor's surgery but to phone for advice.

There doesn't seem to be any real evidence that the strain has a higher than usual mortality rate so could we please cast the idea of "Survivors" out of our collective consciousness for a moment.

Flu is a nasty disease. If you've ever had it (rather than the cold that you told everyone was flu) you wouldn't wish it on anyone. It kills people. Mostly people with heart and/or lung problems because it's a respiratory illness. However, for most people, most of the time it makes you feel lousy for a week and then washed out for a couple more weeks. Then you get better.

However, we all live with the risk of flu all the time.

Please can we get a sense of proprotion but without belittling the importance completely, please?

OK, I'm going for a little lie down...I feel a little unwell. You don't think....?



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