The news reports about H5N1 avian flu have filtered up to corporate board rooms. BusinessWeek reports that some large corporations are taking pandemic preparedness seriously.

POSSIBLE SCENARIOS. Increasingly, though, the threat of a global pandemic is beginning to creep into executive suites. "It's a giant leap from a year ago, when it wasn't on the business community's radar screen," says Dorothy Teeter, director of public health for Seattle & King County, Wash. DuPont formed a 20-person pandemic team in May. With avian flu spreading, the team stepped up its pace in October and now meets every week.

French construction-materials company Lafarge, which lost 200 employees in Indonesia during last December's killer tsunami, has launched an avian flu intranet site to send information to distant operations. Pitney Bowes (PBI ) in Stamford, Conn., is ensuring that large numbers of employees can work from home. And 17 U.S. airports have or are setting up quarantine programs. The lesson from past megadisasters is that "you have to think the unthinkable," says Christian Crews, director of futures strategy at Pitney Bowes.

Businesses could reduce the disruption and risk from a highly lethal pandemic by what I call "workplace cocooning". Basically, some workplaces could be converted into live-in quarantine areas where groups worked together but isolated from the outside world. For more on this see my previous post "Economic Collapse Avoidable During An Influenza Pandemic". Even short of a full quarantine one step businesses could take during a pandemic would be to partition people up into workgroups that rarely come into contact with other workgroups. Instead of putting people into large rooms full of cubicles put them in smaller rooms with just the people they need to work with. Also, stagger hours so that fewer people are in a building at the same time. The general goal should be to reduce the number of times people have to come into contact with other people and reduce number of different people from different groups that each person needs to come into contact with.

Businesses could do many other things to reduce disease transmission risk during a pandemic. Many of those changes could be made in advance of a pandemic with the added benefit of reducing the rate of infectious illness spread in workplaces. First off, encourage sick people to stay at home. Far too many people bring diseases to work and reduce the productivity of others who then get the diseases. Second, make physical changes in workplaces to reduce the amount to which workers have to touch common work surfaces which can transmit viruses. For example, make doors openable without the use of hands to turn door knobs. Also, make water at sinks controllable without the use of hands to touch knobs.

Workplaces could also be structured to reduce the distance that cough droplets can travel. Raise up cubicle walls all the way to the ceiling for example. Make it easier for individual workers to isolate themselves from people who they do not have business needs to come into contact with. When workers do come in coughing either suggest they go home or hand them face masks.

How about offering free flu vaccines in workplaces? Just get up from your desk and get a shot in 5 minutes instead of having to make a doctor's appointment or having to hunt down a clinic offering shots. Businesses also ought to lobby for the development of vaccines against rhinoviruses and other causes of the common cold. Costs are there to be eliminated. We need to treat diseases as costs that are in urgent need of elimination.

Normal colds and flus are costly enough and unpleasant enough that businesses ought to change their practices to reduce the incidence of infectious diseases even before considering the potential threat from avian flu.