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'Pandemic Fatigue' Sets In (Or Maybe You've Noticed)

The avian flu has a plot line similar to a Stephen King novel. It’s a menacing presence, mysterious and somewhat hidden, striking in out-of-way places and threatening broader havoc -- a global evil. And until this year, it was a best-seller in newsrooms, spurring headlines that raised public attention and spurred organizations to plan for it.

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld

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unity. "We have to make arrangements to sustain students on our campus," he says.

Chuck Conway, IT operations manager at an energy firm he didn’t identify, says pandemic planning has become part of the company’s overall business continuity planning, and he says it has examined its capacity to support remote workers and have developed scenarios. He says increased media attention on this issue may prompt more IT spending to build out even more capacity, but for now "we can live with what we have."

The avian influenza has killed a little more than 200 people, about half in Indonesia. The fear is that the virus will change into something that’s easily spread by people, touching off a global pandemic.

Earlier this fall, financial services groups along with the U.S. Department of Treasury conducted a three-week planning scenario, and planned for pandemic that would kill about 1.7 million people in the U.S. and hospitalize 9 million. About 10,000 people from 3,000 companies participated in what may have been largest test of its kind in the world.

But when organizers held a press conference to announce preliminary details from the test, it received little in the way of press attention, except from trade publications, says Jim Binder, a spokesman for The Options Clearing Corp., a Chicago-based provider of derivatives clearing and settlement service. Binder was involved in the overall organizing effort. "It’s not as sensational to talk about the bird flu today as it was a year ago," he says.

The avian flu remains a focal point of several diligent blogs. Among them is the H5N1 blog maintained by Crawford Kilian, a writer who teaches at a Canadian college. In response to some questions, he wrote in a note: "Business planning for a pandemic is like making your will -- because you have to contemplate something awful, you’d rather not contemplate it at all. So if the media aren’t nagging us, we’ll put it off. The catch-22 is that they won’t nag us unless people are dying daily and in growing numbers."

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld