By Richard Moss | May 11, 2009 | 3819 reads

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Now call me a cynic if you will; but I’m betting security professionals involved in pandemic planning and business continuity have had more conversations with the leadership of their respective organizations in the past - what, say 4 to 5 weeks - than perhaps they did in the previous 12 months.

The reason of course is obvious, the threat of a global pandemic from Swine Flu (okay, okay, Influenza A) has been very real in the minds of the global media with the World Health Organization playing its part as have ordinary citizens flocking to stock up on everything from food to surgical masks to disinfectant etc., etc.

But as Influenza A fades from the media front-page it's worth noting this latest incident has sparked numerous debates, some genuine and some quite bizarre: one apparently is that swine flu is in itself an argument against ‘intelligent design’ (okay, and that’s important because…?); it has also rekindled that old chestnut that SARS was an escaped military lab experiment with swine flu part of some on-going bio-weapons test; and perhaps the weirdest reaction yet is a concern that pigs themselves were somehow getting a “bad rap” from all the negative publicity.

Laugh if you will, but so concerned were the Mexican government that the pigs might somehow be successful in their campaign to disassociate the name ‘swine’ from the virus – and presumably associate Mexicans instead – that it insisted the name be changed also. So, people are dying and we care about pigs feelings and prioritize the name of the virus, right?

But of course the pandemic threat was, and remains, no laughing matter. Those that lived through SARS in Hong Kong recall with great fear the immense changes to everyday life that it brought, not to mention a terrible death toll; and SARS is merely a blip on the greater scale that a full-blown, global pandemic would bring.

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