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An article that appeared a few weeks ago in the Salt Lake City, Utah Tribune underscores the need to remain vigilant regarding migratory wildfowl -- and the diseases they carry.  It is also a shot across the bow of those who think migrating birds have gotten an unfair rap when it comes to carrying disease long distances.  It does, however, validate the claim that wild birds can be as much a victim as a carrier, especially where this disease is concerned (read on).

Avian cholera killing water fowl at Great Salt Lake

Avian cholera is killing eared grebes, ducks and gulls on the Great Salt Lake in what is becoming an all-too-regular event on the important migratory bird flyway.

Prevailing northwesterly winds have blown about 1,500 bird carcasses into windrows along a half-mile stretch of the lake's southern shoreline near Saltair, Tom Aldrich, migratory game bird expert for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said Wednesday.

While the disease doesn't affect humans, people shouldn't pick up the birds or let their dogs chew on them, he said.      Avian cholera has been confirmed in the eared grebes. Gull and duck carcasses have been sent to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., for analysis.  "If I was a betting man, I would bet it was cholera," Aldrich said.

Introduced from domestic fowl during the 1940s, avian cholera has become the most common infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl but didn't appear in Utah until the late 1990s. In 2004, avian cholera killed about 30,000 eared grebes on the Great Salt Lake.

http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_7871181

The disease is not limited to Utah birds, however.  A more recent article in the Stockton, California Record also laments the appearance of avian cholera.

Birds diagnosed with avian cholera

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080112/A_NEWS/80111014

And still another article, this time from the Eureka, California Times-Standard:

Waterfowl hit hard by cholera

 Thousands of waterfowl have succumbed to disease over the past month in one of the worst outbreaks of avian cholera on the North Coast in more than 60 years.

The lessons of avian cholera can be easily carried over to avian flu.  Imagine if domestic fowl were somehow infected with H5N1.  The disease is then carried over to wild birds, instead of vice versa.  The migratory birds then move, and transmit the virus to other domestic fowl.  This pattern repeats itself over and over again until we have our own "Clade" of avian H5N1. 

The chapter is: http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/field_manual/chapter_7.pdf

Now, I want to awaken those who think that there is no such thing as backyard poultry in America.  HAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAA!  Are you WRONG!  First, I will tell you about one of my nephews, who lives on an island off the coast of Washington State.  He is a farmer.  He has also raised a rooster to be his pet.  He (the rooster) comes into the home during the day and returns to his coop in the evening.  Kind of like a Peabody Hotel without the $175 a night rooms and chicken instead of duck.

Anyway, I have told his father that his son is MAD.  I have pointed out the location of the island -- in the thickest part of the Pacific Flyway.  Oh well, all you can do is all you can do.  But how about this AP article from December, 2007, that was picked up by MSNBC, ABC News and other sources:

Pet chickens may be plucked from owners

CHICAGO - Chicago's City Council is poised to send a message to residents: We don't want your clucking chickens.

Coming up for a vote Wednesday is a proposal to ban chickens, a former barnyard denizen that is pecking its way into cities across the country as part of a growing organic food trend among young professionals and other urban dwellers.

Chicken lovers say the birds make great pets, do not take up much backyard space and provide tasty, nutritious eggs.

Cities including Madison, Wisconsin, and Kent, Washington, have passed ordinances allowing people to keep chickens. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a councilman says he plans to introduce a resolution to allow hens to be kept for eggs, and the Board of Zoning Appeals in the upscale Indianapolis suburb of Carmel recently approved an exception to city rules to allow a family to keep three hens in their backyard.

But the Chicago alderman who proposed a Chicago ban say chicken lovers forget that the birds attract rodents.

"This past summer I started hearing that residents were letting chickens out of their yard and they were leaving poop and mice were feeding off of it," said Alderman Lona Lane. "Then we started getting rodent-control problems and, sure enough, it was the chickens."

There are also concerns about parasites the birds might carry, and the possibility that they could transmit bird flu if it makes its way to the U.S., said Dr. Marek Digas, the supervising veterinarian at the city's Commission on Animal Care and Control.

"It is something we should consider," he said.

Rooster racket
Many neighbors of chicken-keepers are not happy, either. This year, the city received more than 700 complaints about chickens — though mostly about the racket from roosters.

"We don't encourage people to keep roosters because of the noise," said Johannes Paul, one of the founders of Omlet, a British company that sells a dome-shaped chicken house called the eglu in the U.S for $495.

"The chickens will produce eggs more than happily without a rooster around," Paul said.

Chicagoan Kim Jackson said her two chickens, Papoo and Chalmers, do a little quiet talking but that's it.

She says they do not smell, largely because she and her husband regularly clean up after them. But even if they did not, "it's not nearly as bad as a dog as far as how far-reaching the smell will get," she said.

Fresher eggs
Although there are no firm statistics on the number of city chickens, they are becoming so popular that Backyard Poultry magazine was relaunched a couple of years ago after halting publication in the 1980s. And Paul said U.S. sales of his company's designer chicken coops have doubled every year since they were introduced here in 2005.

Those who have eaten eggs from their own chickens say they are far fresher and tastier than store-bought eggs.

"And they're so productive for the garden," said Owen Taylor, training and livestock coordinator of Just Food, a New York-based nonprofit group. "They aerate the soil, eat bugs and they look like little tractors, tilling the soil."

Taylor said he was surprised that Chicago — a city that banned foie gras in restaurants over concerns about cruelty to geese and embraced rooftop gardening — is not more welcoming of chickens.

"The mayor has bees on the roof of City Hall so I was thinking Chicago was ahead of its time in terms of livestock regulations," said Taylor.

Some say the experience of chicken-keepers in other cities proves Chicago's proposed ordinance is unnecessary.

"You hear the same argument (that) they're loud, they smell ... that there would be wild chickens running amok in Seattle, but that hasn't been the case,' said Angelina Shell, of Seattle Tilth, a nonprofit organic gardening and urban ecology group.

What may doom them in Chicago, say chicken supporters, is that for all the talk about noise, smell and disease, chickens simply do not look like they belong in today's modern city.

"It's a gentrification issue," said Erika Allen of Growing Power, a nonprofit group that promotes urban gardening around the country. "People move in and they don't want chickens next to their house so they go and complain."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22215439/  (bold all mine)

Chicagoans, obviously tired of seeing their beloved Cubs choke year in and year out, have decided to adopt chickens and put them in their backyards.  So what makes Chicago, or Ann Arbor, or Madison, any different than Kolkata, Tangerang or rural Britain?  Only the absence of high-path H5N1  -- for now.

I have not posted anything on the worsening situation in India because, quite frankly, the scope of it is so huge that it took me days to come to terms with it.

Specifically, the area is West Bengal, a state located along the nation’s border with Bangladesh. It is some 33,000 square miles, just larger in area than South Carolina. When you combine affected areas of adjacent Bangladesh, the region is about the same size and shape as Maine. It has the third-best economy in India, and is home to more than 80,000,000 people, or roughly 8% of the nation’s population. Its capital is Kolkata, or what we used to call Calcutta.

So what is going on in West Bengal? Chaos. Tens of thousands of chickens have literally dropped dead in the past month. Thousands of dead, diseased fowl litter the streets of rural villages in West Bengal. It is the worst outbreak of H5N1 in India’s history, a fact confirmed by the WHO. And it is centered around backyard poultry as well as larger farms. Across the border in Bangladesh, similar events are occurring.

The Indian government has taken the task seriously, using the words ‘war footing” and calling up literally thousands of veterinarians to help supervise the culling of what will certainly wind up being nearly two million chickens. The Indian equivalent of the National Guard has been called up to help stop the smuggling of poultry into and out of the West Bengal area. And the Indian government has made the decision to try and cull migratory wildfowl as well as chickens.

But farmers and villagers alike are resisting the government’s efforts to combat the virus. In acts of insane defiance, many are cooking and eating poultry they strongly suspect is diseased. They are hiding birds from the authorities, and are demanding immediate compensation for the birds being culled. In some cases, they are attacking the cullers as they approach.

They are also furious at what they perceive to be an initial lackluster response from the West Bengal government. Rumors abound that chickens had been dying for weeks prior to the discovery of H5N1.

Naturally, the sudden loss of so many birds has caused shockwaves through the Indian markets, both poultry and stock. For a nation that as a general rule does not eat beef, this is putting one of the two main protein sources (the other is mutton) for over one billion people in serious jeopardy. Contrary to popular belief, only 31% of Indians are vegetarians, according to a 2006 survey performed by the Hindu newspaper and CNN-IBN. While some 55% of Brahmins are vegetarians, most Hindus are non-vegetarians. This means that the loss of two million chickens will create a tough situation for those rural villagers who rely upon chickens for sustenance.  http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/08/14/stories/2006081403771200.htm

Because of a shortage of supplies, these culls are taking gruesome form. Birds’ necks are being broken to kill them, and workers may or may not have protective equipment.

So it was not surprising that we would soon start hearing reports of people being hospitalized with bird flu symptoms. These reports are, at least for now, confined to cullers and children. Thousands of courses of Tamiflu have been sent into the West Bengal state for precautionary purposes, according to Indian media reports.

Shockwaves are also being felt in the wildlife community. Media reports of dead and dying crows, hawks, owls, vultures, dogs, pigs and other animals are unsettling to say the least. And the images of the dying tigers at the Bangkok Zoo a few years ago (you recall with horror as over forty tigers died from eating H5N1-contaminated meat) could be rekindled if diseased birds are eaten by those magnificent Bengal tigers.

Coincidentally, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt was recently in India, looking at vaccine and health care facilities and factories that produce goods for the US market. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! (thanks to treyfish for that tidbit).

Now the BBC has reporters at Ground Zero of the outbreak.

West Bengal battles with bird flu

By Rahul Tandon
BBC News, Margram

Margram is a large village in West Bengal - it is also the epicentre of the bird flu outbreak.

As I walk into the village, I can see a group of young children playing in the fields. Next to them are dead chickens. Some of the children are picking up the dead bird's feathers to sell. They have no idea of the dangers of touching infected birds.

Next to them, sat outside his hut, is an old man. Anwar Hoque has his head in his hands. As I walk past he starts shouting: "We have no help from the government - we want medicines but they are not providing us with them and we have cannot afford to buy them from the shops."

There is no sign of the flu anti-viral Tamiflu here.

Slow progress

What strikes me about this rural village is the lack of government officials.

Many of the 60,000 people who live here keep chickens - indeed some estimate that there were 150,000 chickens in this village before the outbreak of bird flu. For many, poultry farming is their only source of income. Yet very few know anything about avian flu - and there seem to be few officials on hand to provide these villagers with information.

After walking around the village for 15 minutes I finally see a team of men in protective white suits. They are part of the culling team. The state government here in West Bengal has ordered the culling of 400,000 birds.

But progress is very slow. The man leading this team is Dr Ramchandratta. He tells me this morning they have only killed five birds.

He is angry with the villagers and says: "They are not interested in handing over their birds and that is making life very hard for us." In front of me, one of his team has a young chick in his hand and is surrounded by a group of children.

He kills it by breaking its neck.

'Chaotic'

As I walk away Dr Ramchandratta asks me to come back. He tells me he is a "soldier of the government" and he is trying his best but people are not listening to him. There are stories here of some villagers smuggling birds out to other areas and even of some culling teams being attacked.

It is a chaotic scene. Just outside the village is a large yellow building. It is from here that Kakoli Mukherjee is directing operations to tackle the problem. Sitting at her desk, she is surrounded by villagers.

She accepts that there are problems, but says: "none of us have any experience of dealing with this disease". Avian flu is spreading across West Bengal.

As I drive out of Margram it is clear that unless the villagers and the local government start working together this problem can only get worse.

The article can be read at this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7198985.stm

A Google map from Dr. Henry Niman shows the locations of confirmed and suspected poultry H5N1:

LE TELEGRAM

TO: MONSIEUR BERNARD VALLAT

FROM: OIE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

SUBJECT: YOUR COMMENTS RE H5N1

MONSIEUR VALLAT STOP OUTBREAK OF H5N1 GROWING TO ALARMING DIMENSIONS IN BANGLADESH STOP ALSO SITUATION IN INDIA WORSENING BY THE HOUR STOP FARMERS NOT HEEDING CALL TO CULL BIRDS BECAUSE YOU SAID SITUATION OVERBLOWN STOP OUR OWN FRENCH GOVERNMENT RAISED BIRD FLU ALARM LEVEL BECAUSE OF OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN SWANS JUST ACROSS CHANNEL FROM US STOP YOUR CLARIFICATION DID NOTHING TO DISCOURAGE NAYSAYERS LIKE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY FROM QUOTING YOU STOP SINCE WHEN DID JOHN BIRCHERS BECOME EXPERTS IN MICROBIOLOGY ANYWAY STOP WE JUST CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN IRANIAN POULTRY STOP ALSO CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN UKRAINE STOP W.H.O. NOW SAYS TEN CLADES OF H5N1 NOW EXIST SIMULTANEOUSLY AROUND THE WORLD WHICH INVALIDATES YOUR CLAIM THAT H5N1 IS EXTREMELY STABLE STOP SO WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT H5N1 STOP STOP STOP STOP

You may recall that in December, 2006, an article appeared in MSBNC.com.

Govt. is looking in wrong place for bird flu Birds from Latin America most likely to bring virus to U.S., study says

WASHINGTON - Birds from Latin America — not from the north — are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.

The United States’ $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.

Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.

Poultry trade riskier than migratory birds
“The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds,” said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York. Other researchers on the study came from the Smithsonian Institution.

If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, it could be a matter of time before a migratory bird carries the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.

“It’s not just a matter of worrying about who you trade with, but it’s a matter of thinking about who do your neighbors trade with, and who do your trading partners trade with,” Kilpatrick said. “We need to be looking both south and north.”

The study concluded that “current American surveillance plans that focus primarily on the Alaskan migratory bird pathway may fail to detect the introduction of H5N1 into the United States in time to prevent its spread into domestic poultry.”

The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.

The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn’t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.

The study found that:

• Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
• Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
• Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade.

U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.

'A big puzzle'
“When you look at scientific literature, it’s a big puzzle. This puts in a few more pieces,” said David Swayne, director of the Agriculture Department’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.

Swayne cautioned that researchers looked only at countries’ import restrictions through 2005.

“I’m not saying it’s the fault of the study; the study is designed to look at what happened in the past,” Swayne said. “We have to be very careful not to over-interpret. There is a limit on how recent the data is.”

In addition, Agriculture Department officials said they are not focusing exclusively on Alaska.

More resources have been spent in Alaska than in other states so far, but testing is happening throughout the lower 48, and the U.S. is even helping Mexico do surveillance, said Tom DeLiberto, the department’s National Wildlife Disease Coordinator.

“We have more information now than we did when we designed the surveillance effort last fall,” DeLiberto said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16043274

When that article ran, I called my sources at the University of Florida (Go Gators! Go Tebow!). UF has an ongoing program designed to map the migratory routes of wild birds throughout South America, but the program has met with little overall success. The reasons? Among other things, that region is a hotbed of geopolitical instability. Unlike in North America and Europe, many South American and Central American nations palpably don't like each other very much. Drug cartels, Maoist guerrillas, and despots abound. Their level of distrust is heightened by the shenanigans of such wretched types as Venezuela's tyrant-in-training, Hugo Chavez, and his clear efforts at destabilizing the region. For those who take issue: Newsweek's expose regarding how Chavez and his "reform" proposals got their asses kicked in the recent elections and the Venezuelan military's declaration that if Chavez tried to overturn the election results (he tried, oh how he tried to overturn them) would prompt a coup de tat, they sat down and "negotiated" a face-saving 51% to 49% defeat. What a cur.

But I digress. Fact of the matter is, there are pitifully few well-mapped migratory wildfowl routes in the Americas south of Mexico. This seriously hampers efforts at surveillance, because if you don't know where the birds migrate to and from, you don't know what you don't know.

Over two-thirds of all the landbirds that breed in temperate North America, for example, migrate long distances to nonbreeding areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean (Keast and Morton 1980, Rappole 1995).

That's it??!!

Not quite. Another reference, from the University of Florida paper titled " The potential for applying current research techniques on migratory bird biology in South America" http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/ajahn/applying%20tech1.htm , states:

Ironically, very little information exists on the migratory strategies of virtually any of the migratory bird species on the continent that is home to the world’s richest avifauna, South America. This condition exists in spite of the fact that austral migration, in which migration occurs between temperate and tropical South America, is one of the major avian migratory systems in the world and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (Chesser 1994). With unique habitats, topographies and rapidly growing environmental alteration by humans, potential threats unique to South American migrants which depend on a range of resources across wide ranges throughout the year, may be significant.

Okay, let's review. We know we currently have low-path bird flu (H5N2) in the Dominican republic. We also know that there is a lax approach taken to poultry management and poultry health in Mexico, and other places in the Americas. We also know there is a real lack of hard data on where migratory birds go when they venture South of the Equator. We also know that things have a way of coming up from Down There, namely killer bees, dengue fever (see my latest post on dengue), and other maladies also venture up from the Americas all the time. Here's the latest: Suddenly, yellow fever is back on the list of things Brazilians are worrying about (see “Millions in Brazil seek shots in yellow fever scare” http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN15407443  with a hat-tip to Slawdog..

These lessons, apparently, have not been lost on the US government, which for some strange reason seems to be actually reading these articles and acting upon them! From last week:

Bird flu: US/Chile coordinate detection in Tierra del

Fuego

Computerworld magazine does a fine job of keeping pandemic preparedness on the minds of Chief Information Officers (that's Head Geek of corporate and government IT-dom), as well as decision-makers and IT personnel.

Anyway, in their latest issue appears this gem of a story:

Eight-day IT outage would cripple most companies

Gartner survey finds business continuity plans lack ability to withstand longer outages

January 10, 2008 (Computerworld) -- A Gartner Inc. poll of information security and risk management professionals released today shows that most business continuity plans could not withstand a regional disaster because they are built to overcome severe outages lasting only up to seven days.

Gartner analyst Roberta Witty said that the results of the poll show that organizations must "mature" their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies to enable IT operations and staffers to endure outages of at least 30 days. Such efforts would require additional IT budget spending and collaboration across enterprise business units at most corporations, she noted.

Gartner surveyed 359 IT professionals from the U.S., U.K. and Canada during 2007 on their business continuity efforts, and nearly 60% said that their business continuity plans are limited to outages of seven days or less.

Further, results showed most companies focus on rebounding from internal IT disruptions, not from regional disasters that could also damage facilities. A very shortsighted tactic, remarked Witty, considering damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as potential harm from outages, terrorist attacks, pandemics, service provider outages, civil unrest or other unpredictable event.

"If you start looking at some of the events we've [experienced] over the last few years, companies must plan for events that actually take much longer to recover from," Witty said. "This is an issue [businesses] have to deal with -- it's in front of everyone's face right now." 

The survey found that 77% of companies have come up with a business continuity plan covering power outages caused by fire, while 72% have a plan to get up and running after a natural disaster. Only 50% of companies are prepared to rebound from terrorism-related IT outages.

Witty did say that companies are starting to take pandemic concerns more seriously than in the past. The survey showed that 29% of organizations now have pandemic recovery measures in place, up from just 8% in 2005.

To withstand an outage of up to 30 days, companies must improve cross-training efforts and streamline emergency management, notification and incident management techniques for quicker response, she added. "That's what [business continuity] is about. If you don't have people to manage it, a data center is useless," Witty remarked.

I lectured on pandemic preparedness at Gartner's international conference in Orlando in 2006, and I know Ken McGee of Gartner, who (along with yours truly, of course) is one of the few recognized bona fide IT pandemic experts on the planet.  So Gartner is extremely well-focused on this topic.  Their research on this, and other topics, is first-rate.  It's "take it to the bank"-type material.

So when Gartner says sixty percent of American corporate and government organizations cannot sustain disaster recovery services beyond seven days, believe it.  And that is extremely bad news for any calamity, be it caused by a virus or a match.

Let me take you through the world of telecommuting plans.  They all originate in large data centers -- operations centers with floor tiles raised over twelve inches from the floor to accept conduits full of cables and cooling pipes and to keep equipment high and dry if those pipes burst and water seeps in.  They are also very chilly, so they can keep the multitudes of computers cool and, thus, more efficient.  (Heat is the enemy of computers, which is why you should blow out all computers thoroughly with canned air at least once a year.)  These data centers are also stuffed with what we call remote-access servers.  These servers are powered by UNIX, or Linux, or Microsoft Server products.  They run Windows Terminal Services, or Citrix, or some other emulation software.  And they need lots and lots and lots of bandwidth and processor power and energy.

And the stuff in data centers breaks sometimes.  Computers are machines, too, like the washer. Anything from a poorly-seated accessory card to a botched software patch can render a million dollars' worth of remote access equipment unusable.  That, in turn, requires hands-on work to fix.  You can't fix a physically broken appliance remotely, even if it is a computer.  You occasionally, sometimes frequently, need to take the machine physically down and get into it up to your elbows.  That takes people, people.  And if you are down 30% to 40% on your server team staff, you are in deep trouble.

Now the remote-access packets of data pass through the network; banks of appliances called routers and switches, any of which can break, for the same reasons as above.  Then after this leaves your organization's firewall (another appliance), you have to rely upon the Internet, and the same dynamics apply to all the equipment that runs the Internet.  Finally, you get to your PC or laptop, maybe in a hotel in Burbank, or your home in Tuscaloosa.  So if your cable/DSL modem is working properly, AND if you can get to the Internet, AND you can get back to your hosting data center, AND that remote equipment is running, AND you can log in to your validation server:  Well, that's a huge bunch of "ifs", even on a good day.  The fact this stuff even works most of the time is a huge testament to IT everywhere.  So hug a geek today!

This applies to all the participants in the work-at-home food chain:  The organization, the IT service provider, the telecommunications provider, all the way to the electric company.  If any of these links fails (and it will in a pandemic), the entire chain is worthless.  That is why corporations and governments alike must prepare to make the calls to bring people back into their offices when the Internet becomes unreliable.

That is also why these same organizations must undertake measures NOW to acquire masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes.  But that is a lesson left for another day.

The biggest concern after staff shortages and broken stuff is the issue of supply chain failures.  The Just-in-time supply chain, as we all know and preach, is lethally exposed during a pandemic.  During the runup to Y2K, we drilled incessantly in Florida for supply chain failures.  We even went so far as to have the National Guard ready to escort convoys of Winn-Dixie food from warehouses in Alabama to their distribution points within Florida's Panhandle. 

In a pandemic, everything will be constrained and in short supply.  This especially means spare parts and replacement equipment for IT, since so much of it comes from overseas (Asia).  It is difficult to get some networking equipment delivered quickly on a good day, let alone in the middle of an influenza pandemic.  In fact, Michael Dell told me personally in 2006 that the SARS experience has fueled Dell's initiative to try and develop a Singapore-to-Ireland revolving door of manufacturing during a pandemic.  The theory is that while one area is savaged, the other might be on the path to recovery.  The company is making the best assumption it can; namely, that it must find a way to continue operations, or perish.  Dell will also try and maintain larger inventories of certain parts, although those components change so quickly that it is an egregious violation of Dell's own business model to store anything in too much quantity for too long.

It might surprise some to know that Dell has taken such a proactive approach to pandemic planning.  But I know Dell to be a forward-thinking and forward-leaning corporation, so it is not surprising to see them adopt such an approach.  The problem is that Dell is so alone when it comes to such planning.  And this is reinforced by Gartner's latest study, which again reinforces the limitless, ignorant arrogance of people -- including IT people and their superiors, regrettably -- to think a calamity will never happen to them.

Lower Manhattan and New Orleans professionals know the tremendous impact an extended calamity can cause.  That is why companies such as Merrill Lynch are global Best Practices at disaster recovery.  There's nothing like experience to help shape attitudes.