Tall tales of extreme weather are well underway this season. One UK newspaper has already declared this winter to be the worst in 100 years.
Popular as these stories no doubt are—exploiting a noted national obsession with talking about the weather—similar sensationalism in the mainstream media can have a real impact on another winter phenomena: seasonal influenza.
According to a recent report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, exploring US and European business strategies for mitigating the annual virus, perceived risks of “pandemic” influenza are among the top factors likely to raise the status of seasonal influenza as a business priority.
From a pure business risk perspective, this makes little sense. Health experts say the distinction between pandemic and epidemic influenza is merely an artificial one. Both terms essentially describe widespread outbreaks of diseases. Pandemics spread across international borders while epidemics typically remain localised, but both can impose business costs stemming from employees absenteeism.
“There is an absolute connection between the two and people don’t get it,” says Dr Jonathan Van-Tam in the report. “Pandemic flu viruses don’t disappear from human circulation after they have produced a pandemic. They re-circulate as seasonal flu, as H1N1 is doing at present.” Mr Van-Tam, a consultant on pandemic flu to the WHO, goes on to say, “There is no real difference in the way seasonal flu spreads to the way pandemic flu spreads; the difference will be the scale.”
Why is it that managers tend to treat influenza as a business risk only when it is associated with global outbreaks? Senior executives and experts interviewed for the EIU report repeatedly cite the mobilising impact of media coverage of pandemic outbreaks, both on senior management preparation and employee engagement with flu mitigation initiatives.
“If newspapers are full of stories, people come and want the vaccination. If newspapers don’t write anything about influenza then people forget about it. That’s quite normal,” says Stefan Lang, chief medical officer at BASF, a German chemical company.
It is easy to see why this. When report of swine flu first emerged in Mexico in 2009 some newspapers went into overdrive, particularly in the UK. One British tabloid headline said swine flu “could kill up to 120m”. The accompanying story quoted leading medical experts making comparisons with the lethal Spanish flu of 1918. Another newspaper told its readers the UK government was preparing mass graves to bury a surge of swine flu victims.
Despite the stark headlines referred to above, swine flu is estimated to have caused between 150,000 and 500,000 deaths worldwide, someway short of the 20m to 50m killed by Spanish flu (though, in fairness, not all news outlets took the same view).
Of course, it would be foolish of companies not to heed such warnings—whether they relate to potentially catastrophic pandemics or predictions of phenomenally poor weather. Preparations that were put in place for swine flu would certainly have contributed to keeping the death toll down. At the same time, companies should not rely on such warnings to dictate their overall approach to flu, which is an annual occurrence.
This confusion about pandemic flu and seasonal flu is characteristic of other aspects of the virus, where there continues to be both a lack of information and plenty of misinformation about its impact. Surprising as it may seem to some, there have only been four pandemic influenza outbreaks in the past century (see chart). Swine flu, the most recent outbreak in 2009, was the first flu pandemic in 40 years.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
