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Panasonic ordering staff home over flu fears
By Helen Branswell, Medical Reporter, THE CANADIAN PRESS
2009-02-10 13:24:00
A plan by Panasonic Corp. to repatriate families of overseas employees because of fears of a flu pandemic drew a perplexed reaction from the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl said there is no evidence that the risk of a pandemic caused by the H5N1 avian flu virus is any higher now than it was last year or the year before.
“There’s been no change in the way that the virus is behaving,” Hartl said from Geneva.
“So there’s really no reason for anyone all of a sudden to take such actions. Because today is no different from yesterday.”
Panasonic Corp. said Tuesday it has ordered families of its Japanese overseas employees to return home from countries or regions where the company believes there may be a pandemic risk. The orders were issued in December but families have until September to return to Japan.
Company spokesman Akira Kadota said employees will stay put, but families of those working in China, Asia (excluding Singapore), the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America are to return to Japan.
Kadota denies Panasonic is taking the action as a form of cost-cutting, saying the company has been monitoring the risk posed by H5N1 for some time and wants to move while it is still possible to relocate the families.
“It would be very difficult to quickly return home should a pandemic strike,” he said.
Hartl said there is no justification for the decision from a public health perspective. “There is no sense that the risk has risen. We are definitely still in Phase 3.”
The World Health Organization assesses the pandemic risk according to a six-stage scale, with Phase 1 viewed as low risk and Phase 6 being a pandemic.
The current assessment, that the world is at Phase 3, reflects the fact that there are occasional human infections with a novel influenza virus deemed to have pandemic potential.
That alert would only move up a notch to Phase 4 if the WHO saw signs of a significant increase in human-to-human spread of the virus.
From time to time over the past five years there have been cases where limited human-to-human spread was thought to have taken place. But those transmission chains died out after one or two generations of spread.
The H5N1 virus, which first caused human infections in 1997, re-emerged in late 2003. It has decimated poultry flocks throughout much of Southeast Asia, spreading to Central Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe.
It has caused at least 406 human infections in 15 countries and claimed at least 254 lives in 12 of them.
Panasonic, the world’s biggest maker of plasma TVs, last week said it was cutting 15,000 employees from its work force over the next year and forecast its first annual net loss in six years.
Panasonic has 200 affiliated companies overseas, about 70 in China, and 70 more in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.
http://money.canoe.ca/News/Other/2009/02/10/8338746-cp.html
Panasonic ordering staff home over flu fears
By Helen Branswell, Medical Reporter, THE CANADIAN PRESS
2009-02-10 13:24:00
A plan by Panasonic Corp. to repatriate families of overseas employees because of fears of a flu pandemic drew a perplexed reaction from the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl said there is no evidence that the risk of a pandemic caused by the H5N1 avian flu virus is any higher now than it was last year or the year before.
“There’s been no change in the way that the virus is behaving,” Hartl said from Geneva.
“So there’s really no reason for anyone all of a sudden to take such actions. Because today is no different from yesterday.”
Panasonic Corp. said Tuesday it has ordered families of its Japanese overseas employees to return home from countries or regions where the company believes there may be a pandemic risk. The orders were issued in December but families have until September to return to Japan.
Company spokesman Akira Kadota said employees will stay put, but families of those working in China, Asia (excluding Singapore), the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America are to return to Japan.
Kadota denies Panasonic is taking the action as a form of cost-cutting, saying the company has been monitoring the risk posed by H5N1 for some time and wants to move while it is still possible to relocate the families.
“It would be very difficult to quickly return home should a pandemic strike,” he said.
Hartl said there is no justification for the decision from a public health perspective. “There is no sense that the risk has risen. We are definitely still in Phase 3.”
The World Health Organization assesses the pandemic risk according to a six-stage scale, with Phase 1 viewed as low risk and Phase 6 being a pandemic.
The current assessment, that the world is at Phase 3, reflects the fact that there are occasional human infections with a novel influenza virus deemed to have pandemic potential.
That alert would only move up a notch to Phase 4 if the WHO saw signs of a significant increase in human-to-human spread of the virus.
From time to time over the past five years there have been cases where limited human-to-human spread was thought to have taken place. But those transmission chains died out after one or two generations of spread.
The H5N1 virus, which first caused human infections in 1997, re-emerged in late 2003. It has decimated poultry flocks throughout much of Southeast Asia, spreading to Central Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe.
It has caused at least 406 human infections in 15 countries and claimed at least 254 lives in 12 of them.
Panasonic, the world’s biggest maker of plasma TVs, last week said it was cutting 15,000 employees from its work force over the next year and forecast its first annual net loss in six years.
Panasonic has 200 affiliated companies overseas, about 70 in China, and 70 more in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.
http://money.canoe.ca/News/Other/2009/02/10/8338746-cp.html
