The Swine Influenza A virus continues to be front page news, and with yesterday’s announcement by the World Health Organization (WHO) that the pandemic alert level has been raised from level 4 (signifying transmission in only one country ) to level 5 (meaning there is sustained human-to-human spread in at least two countries), we felt that it would be prudent to provide a brief update on the steps we are taking in the management of our business.

In the aftermath of the 2003 SARS scare, CC&L established a detailed pandemic response plan as a subset of our overall business continuity plan. The pandemic plan established four levels of response across a wide variety of fundamental business functions with the level of response escalating along with the WHO alert level. The response plan identifies a team of decision makers across the critical functions of the organization that is responsible for the implementation of the plan. The responsibilities of this team include taking all necessary steps to ensure that we are able to continue to effectively operate the fundamental elements of our business while at the same time ensuring the safety of employees and minimizing the likelihood of infection among them as they perform their responsibilities.

Our pandemic response team is meeting regularly and has already taken a number of precautionary steps. These measures include raising the level of awareness of the current situation among our employees (including tracking travel and implementing quarantine if required), working with critical suppliers to ensure they are implementing measures that will sustain their services as the situation evolves and ensuring that should our employees need to work from home all of our critical functions can be completed on a remote basis.

We are confident that our pandemic response plan puts our organization in a position to continue to meet the high performance standards we have set for ourselves. We will keep you up to date as developments occur; however, in the interim if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to call us.