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World 'overdue' for pandemic
22/11/2005 10:29 - (SA)
Sydney - Major shortages of food, fuel and labour would occur during a bird flu pandemic and some companies would be forced to shut down entirely, said Australian experts on Tuesday as Health Minister Tony Abbott warned that a global outbreak was increasingly likely.
Urging businesses to play a leading role in stockpiling the critical raw materials needed for production in the event of a pandemic, security analyst Alan Dupont said companies could also take up to three years to recover should avian flu spread around the world.
The dire notice came as Abbott told a Sydney meeting that a serious bird flu pandemic could be inescapable.
"The world is, we think, overdue for a new pandemic and it's quite likely that the next pandemic will be a serious one," Abbott told the Australian Industry Group event.
The minister said the risk of a bird flu pandemic, which could result should the virus mutate from a disease spread via poultry-to-human contact into a more contagious human-to-human form, was about 10% in any given year.
Millions could die
He said a global pandemic was likely to emerge in Southeast Asia, which has so far accounted for almost all of the deaths from the H5N1 strain of the virus.
Experts have warned that a pandemic could kill millions of people worldwide.
Dupont, a senior fellow for international security at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, said a pandemic would pose a risk to both the production of goods and services and a constant labour force.
"In the first instance - if there is a flu pandemic - tourism, hospitality, transport and retail trade would be the most affected," he said.
Pandemic would affect all industries
Dupont said every industrial sector would potentially suffer and warned business leaders to make contingency plans that would last the two to three years it would take the economy to fully recover.
Dupont also warned of instability in global financial markets, saying there would likely be a rapid sell-off of bonds and equities in Australia, coupled with a flight into cash and gold.
Both Dupont and Abbott stressed that one of the biggest problems for government and business in the event of an outbreak would be to contain panic.
Abbott said while the government had taken all the steps it reasonably could to protect the public, including amassing one of the biggest per capita stockpiles of anti-viral treatments in the world, some Australians would die.
"The worst projections of mortality still show that 99.8% of people will come through any bird flu pandemic in a reasonable state," he said.
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