Tuesday, May 23, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.
In Washington, health experts warn that 40 percent of the nation's workforce might fall ill - or just stay home from work - if avian influenza reached pandemic proportions.
In neighboring California, lawmakers are considering spending $400 million to prepare for bird flu.
And even the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce offers advice on how companies should prepare for the effects of a pandemic.
But in the Southern Nevada tourism industry, there's more concern about a bird flu "panic-demic" and how it might affect travelers coming here.
"More newspapers are sold and more people watch TV if there's something dramatic," said Bruce Bommarito, executive director of the Nevada Commission on Tourism. "But panic hurts us as badly as the situation itself."
That doesn't mean the resort community is burying its collective head in the sand.
"Any time you have a public health issue as vexing as this, it is a concern," said Alan Feldman, a spokesman for MGM Mirage, the largest Strip operator. "Whether you're in the gaming industry or you're Hewlett-Packard, there's concern. But what is there, in all reality, to do about it?"
The Southern Nevada Health District is recommending that local businesses prepare for a pandemic, which experts say could cost the U.S. economy $10 billion in lost productivity and medical costs.
But while health officials are urging companies to develop contingency plans, tourism leaders caution that being Chicken Little can be just as damaging.
"The potential damage is tremendously serious," Bommarito said. "It's got the potential to dwarf all of what 9/11 and SARS did to our economy."
It took more than a year for Southern Nevada tourism to fully recover from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and SARS, a contagious respiratory disease that kept thousands of people from traveling, cutting off an airline route between Asia and Las Vegas.
Bommarito and Terry Jicinsky, executive vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, concur that misconceptions and misinformation have the potential to do as much damage as any outbreak.
"We have to be ready, and we have to react quickly," Bommarito said.
He said communication is the key to preventing misinformation from spreading.
"But at the same time, I don't want to cause a panic that could deflate our whole economy. It's all about information, and a little information could really hurt us."
Jicinsky said the LVCVA maintains contact with health authorities on the local level as well as with the Travel Industry Association to give and receive information about the status of any outbreaks. The state and the LVCVA have a network of contacts worldwide to disseminate information about what effects, if any, avian flu would have locally.
Las Vegas learned in 2002 and 2003 what the hint of a health scare could have on a tourism-based economy. SARS - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - never made it to the United States, yet a number of Asian tourists canceled their travel plans when the outbreak became serious in their countries.
Seyhmus Baloglu, associate dean for research at UNLV's College of Hotel Administration, said he doesn't expect avian flu to have a significant impact on the local economy because only about 10 percent of Southern Nevada's visitors are from foreign countries.
Baloglu says it's highly unlikely that bird flu would ever take hold in Southern Nevada.
"I only see it as a short-term issue, and I don't even see a significant decrease in business," Baloglu said. "There may be some isolated cases in Asia and even Europe, and countries like Turkey and India could face more significant problems. Many people were reluctant to fly (during the SARS outbreak) because they were afraid they were going to be infected on the plane trip."
Jicinsky said it was difficult to verify how much of an impact SARS had on the Las Vegas economy, because the outbreak occurred about the same time as the start of the war in Iraq. Fearing terrorist reprisals, many tourists played it safe and stayed away from the United States.
SARS and the war in Iraq were blamed for the tourism downturn that resulted in the cancellation of nonstop flights between Hong Kong and Las Vegas.
Singapore Airlines spent tens of thousands of dollars marketing the flights, which ended in April 2003 after transporting passengers for less than a year.
But how government officials addressed the SARS outbreak suggests what may occur if avian flu becomes more dangerous, MGM Mirage's Feldman said.
"There were people with equipment in airports checking with arriving passengers who had a fever, and they could isolate them before they could enter the population," Feldman said. "We saw a downturn in travel from Asia, even though most of the problem was isolated to Asia."
But avian flu, health officials say, would be much different from SARS.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization say on their Web sites that avian flu is an infection that occurs naturally among birds and that certain subtypes of the virus can spread from birds to humans. What troubles health authorities is that if the virus mutated, it could become a disease that could be passed between humans.
Symptoms of avian flu are similar to common influenza in humans - fever, coughs, sore throat and muscle aches. Health officials consider an outbreak to be dangerous because the disease could spread faster than a vaccine could be developed to slow it.
Some estimate that 20 percent of the workforce could become ill during a community outbreak and that others would stay home, fearing infection if they ventured out. That high rate of absenteeism could result in production shortages and a disruption in tourism and consumer spending.
Large companies like MGM Mirage, with 6,000 employees nationwide, have established in-house communications networks in their risk management, operations and security departments to keep on top of the latest information on bird flu.
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce has published a disaster planning tool kit for small and midsized businesses called "Open for Business," to assess readiness and planning.
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