July 11, 2007 (Computerworld Canada) -- Given the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002, the idea that companies should prepare their IT systems for what health officials have warned will be an influenza pandemic isn't so far-reaching.
And, the original post is:
A Gartner Inc. analyst, Ken McGee, stated that despite a bird-flu threat most IT companies "simply would not be ready" for disruptions according to a ComputerWorld report.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported statistics on confirmed human cases of the Avian flu (H5N1) virus since 2003. The WHO recorded in 2006 that 79 people died from avian flu. This year, there have been 33 deaths.
If an avian influenza virus combines with a human influenza virus the new subtype created could be both highly contagious and highly lethal in humans. A likely scenario is a global influenza pandemic, similar to the Spanish Flu, or the lower mortality pandemics such as the Asian Flu and the Hong Kong Flu.
In May 2005, scientists urgently call nations to prepare for a global influenza pandemic that could strike as much as 20% of the world's population but this warning has largely been ignored.
To be clear, the avian flu cannot yet be categorized as a "pandemic" because the virus cannot yet cause sustained and efficient human-to-human transmission; the reported cases are recognized to have been transmitted from bird to human, but as of December 2006 there have been very few (if any) cases of proven human-to-human transmission.
On the other hand, if the avian flu imitates the "Spanish flu" of 1918–1919, it could spread to become a world-wide pandemic on all continents, unusually deadly and virulent as the 1918-19 event. Within 18 months the pandemic petered out but before doing so, in six months, 25 million people died: some estimates put the total of those killed worldwide at over twice that number. An estimated 500,000 died in the United States alone.
We are not ready for another 1918-19 event.
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