There seemed to be less suspicion amongst commuters on the London Underground this morning as the papers reported a slow-down in the spread of the Mexican swine-flu outbreak.

Having been party to discussions on pandemic flu in my role as Defence and Security Programme Exec, I knew that a full blown outbreak could be devastating. With only a third of workers off sick, business would grind to a halt, money would run out at cash points, supplies would run out at shops in under two days and hospitals would be overwhelmed. For the moment we have got off lightly, but pandemic flu remains at the top of the Governments security concerns, above natural disaster and terrorist attack.

So in one sense swine-flu can be seen as a blessing – it is a timely reminder of what could be, and a prompt for Government agencies, organisations, businesses and citizens to work together to prepare in earnest for a pandemic.

Some good work is being undertaken by business continuity experts and voluntary organisations to prepare for such eventualities, but as always, more must be done.

What is often forgotten, and should be addressed in the post swine-flu fallout is the use of technology to improve emergency response. As we have seen this week, timely information is key to directing emergency responses, and in the case of flu-outbreaks requires multi-agency, international communications. These communications are currently hampered by a lack of information standards, and any detailed testing or analysis of the adequacy of national and international information flows in emergency situations. Work must be undertaken with the technology community to ensure that in the case of a sustained pandemic outbreak, the right people have the right information to act in time to save lives.

Tags: flu, pandemic, security

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Defence and Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.