Bird flu: IT pros planning for worst

If the avian flu hits the United States, the IT department for the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore could have a problem.

The department sits across the street from the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where a high number of infected patients could be treated and where a large percentage of the staff travel widely as part of their jobs, increasing the likelihood they could come back infected.

"Our biggest fear is that we won't be able to get back to our data center for an extended amount of time, so we set up systems that would make it accessible remotely," says Ross McKenzie, IS director for the school of public health.

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The school has addressed remote control capabilities for PCs and servers by buying 550 GoToMyPC licenses that let network administrators log on via Web-based clients. "Every IT function, except maybe the physical help desk, can be performed remotely at this point," McKenzie says.

Unfortunately, industry experts speculate that, unlike the Bloomberg School, many IS departments are not planning far enough ahead for an outbreak of the avian flu.

Of 167 government workers across eight federal departments, 44% don't know how they should react to a flu emergency, according to a poll by Telework Exchange, an online forum trying to quantify how much teleworking goes on in the federal government.

A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their businesses, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place. The poll, sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, found that close to two-thirds of respondents said they were prepared or somewhat prepared to move employees to remote locations or let them work at home, while 29% said they were not prepared.

The H5N1 influenza virus, which originated in Asia, could hit the United States this fall, potentially causing an epidemic, the nation's chief avian flu coordinator warned last week. It can be transmitted from birds to humans via close contact, but not from human to human - yet.

Flu experts say mutations are almost certain to create a strain that supports human-to-human transmission. The resultant pandemic will make between 75 million and 90 million people sick in the United States, with as many as 2 million deaths, according to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

Some businesses, such as White Electronic Designs in Phoenix, have the basics of plans in place. "We've given consideration to the avian flu situation as part of our enterprise risk management program," says Jim Kritcher, vice president of corporate IT for the firm.

He says plans call for asking workers returning from areas where flu has struck to work from home for a period to avoid infecting others at corporate sites. And the company would conduct as much work as possible remotely. "We would certainly be susceptible, especially since we have employees traveling to Asia on a regular basis. We do a significant amount of manufacturing in China," he says.