BCP Confidential

By Nathaniel Forbes

Blueprints for Business Continuity Planning

India influenza outbreak portends pandemic

Posted in BCP Confidential by Nathaniel Forbes on 2008/01/30 11:49:40

An epidemic of avian influenza in West Bengal, India has the Indian "government in panic mode", according to the Times of India Web site.

And with good reason: 15 million of West Bengal's 80 million people are crammed into its capital city, Kolkata (Calcutta), which is a petri dish of poverty, pollution, political intransigence and hopeless public health. It is the city where Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity order.

If the infection reaches Kolkata's poultry markets, there is a much greater risk of animal-to-human transmission than there has been in Indonesia or Vietnam, where infections of H5N1 influenza have already crossed species from animals to humans.

There have been many more human infections of highly-pathogenic influenza in Indonesia (120 cases, 98 deaths) and Vietnam (102 cases, 48 deaths) than in India. There were three outbreaks of avian influenza in India in 2006, but there have been no human deaths there, yet.

But Kolkata is a whole other miasma of misery. The population density of Kolkata is 24,000 people per square kilometer (62,000 per square mile), the second highest in the world. In comparison, the population density of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest city, is only 3,000 per square kilometer (8,000 per square mile), a fraction of Kolkata's. Even the density of Jakarta, Indonesia, at 12,500 people per square kilometer (33,000 per square mile), is just half that of Kolkata.

For comparison, the density of New York City is 10,400 people per square kilometer (27,000 per square mile). Singapore, the fourth most densely-populated country in the world, has 6,300 people per square kilometer (16,000 per square mile).

India's major population centers of Kolkata, Chennai (Madras), Mumbai (Bombay) and Delhi comprise four of the 13 most-populated and most densely-populated cities in the world. In addition to masses of destitute and therefore vulnerable people, they also host an enormous number of entrepreneurs, technologists and academics who are in demand globally and have the needs and means to travel to most of the developed world's business centers.

With Bangalore and Hyderabad, those cities have also attracted in recent years large numbers of expatriate executives and managers, eager to work on the frontier of globalization, who travel to homes and home offices in Europe, Asia and North America regularly.

With the peripatetic friends and relatives of India's enormous diaspora, the number of potential infection vectors is, practically, infinite.

The outbreak close to one of the world's population centers allows planners to imagine how easily an influenza epidemic in animals could be become a pandemic in humans almost overnight.

Disclaimer:
Views and opinions expressed in this blog are the author's, and do not necessarily represent those of ZDNet Asia.

Talkback 1 comments

Spread of avian flu by drinking water

There is a widespread link between avian flu and water, e.g. in Egypt to the Nile delta or Indonesia to residential districts of less prosperous humans with backyard flocks and without central water supply as in Vietnam:
(web link)
See also the WHO web side:
(web link) and
(web link)
�Influenza: Initial introduction of influenza viruses to the population via abiotic water supply versus biotic human viral respirated droplet shedding� and (web link)
�Transmission of influenza A in human beings�.
Avian flu infections may increase in consequence to increase of virus circulation. Transmission of avian flu by direct contact to infected poultry is an unproved assumption from the WHO. There is no evidence that influenza primarily is transmitted by saliva droplets.
Infected birds and poultry can everywhere contaminate the drinking water. All humans have contact to drinking water. In hot climates/the tropics flood-related influenza is typical after extreme weather and floods. Virulence of influenza viruses depends on temperature and time. Special in cases of local water supplies with �young� and fresh H5N1 contaminated water from low local wells, cisterns, tanks, rain barrels, ponds, rivers or rice paddies this pathway can explain small clusters in households. At 24�C e.g. in the tropics the virulence of influenza viruses in water amount to 2 days. In temperate climates for �older� water from central water supplies cold water is decisive to virulence of viruses. At 7�C the virulence of influenza viruses in water amount to 14 days.
Human to human and contact transmission of influenza occur - but are overvalued immense. In the course of influenza epidemics in Germany, recognized clusters are rare, accounting for just 9 percent of cases e.g. in the 2005 season. In temperate climates the lethal H5N1 virus will be transferred to humans via cold drinking water, as with the birds in February and March 2006, strong seasonal at the time when drinking water has its temperature minimum.
The performance to eliminate viruses from the drinking water processing plants regularly does not meet the requirements of the WHO and the USA/USEPA. Conventional disinfection procedures are poor, because microorganisms in the water are not in suspension, but embedded in particles. Even ground water used for drinking water is not free from viruses.

Dipl.-Ing. Wilfried Soddemann - Free Science Journalist - soddemann-aachen@t-online.de
Posted by Dipl.-Ing. Wilfried Soddemann on Thursday, January 31 2008 09:02 PM

Latest in Blog Central

Subscribe to BlogCentral

Click this link to view this blog as XML.
Add this feed to your online news reader

About the blogger

Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society�s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII�s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.