Because most people feel ambivalent about possible future pandemics, communicating effectively with them requires skillful balance on a wide range of communication 'seesaws.'
You may be tempted to minimize the importance of food-sector pandemic planning because it's not your business. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Several large, influential food companies and organizations contacted by Weekly Briefing had little or nothing to say about their pandemic preparedness plans.
Most people think about possible future pandemicswhen they think about them at allwith a good deal of ambivalence. To communicate with ambivalent people, you need to understand the 'risk communication seesaw.'
(CIDRAP News) An influenza pandemic as severe as the great flu of 1918 could cost the United States $683 billion and plunge the American economy into the second-deepest recession since World War II, a nonprofit health advocacy group warned today.
Weekly Briefing interviewed pandemic preparedness planners from two Fortune 500 companies to find out how they are using exercises and what they are learning. For both, scenarios changed as the exercise progressed. We present one here. Look for the second one in an upcoming article on designing, conducting, and evaluating tabletop exercises.
Exercises—whether simple or complex—can greatly help a business prepare, regardless of its stage of pandemic planning.
The pandemic worst case is:
(a) Truly horrific(b) Truly unlikely(c) Truly worth planning for(d) All of the above
The right answer: (d) All of the above.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Sep 11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina have given many senior executives a small taste of the economic devastation that unforeseen localized events can wreak on a company.
Some pandemic influenza preparedness planners start out with an advantage. Their company culture supports disaster preparedness and senior executives have educated themselves on the threator the CEO "has a certain degree of paranoia" as Boyd George, CEO of the Hickory, NCbased grocery supplier Alex Lee, puts it. He had read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic that alarmed him.