Insurers are waking up to bird flu’s potential

At last the insurance industry is starting to take notice of the potential financial impact of avian flu. And it’s not pretty.
“Pandemic influenza could potentially deal insurers a triple whammy, simultaneously causing unprecedented life and health claims losses, investment portfolio downturns at a time when insurers most need liquidity, and reduced staff and management productivity through the spreading of sickness among company personnel,” stated Dr. Andrew Coburn, RMS project lead on influenza pandemic risk modeling.”
In contrast to the intellectual financial modeling of RMS, Risk and Insurance magazine published a timeline of a human-to-human transmissable flu scenario that is scarier than Freddie Krueger.
(I posted on the potential impact of avian flu on health and life insurers some weeks ago.)
For those readers really interested in the whole bird flu thing, there are two blogs that are really really good. Roy Poses et al at Health Care Renewal do an excellent job of sorting through the chaff to find the wheat. And the anonymous public health officials at Effect Measure are way in front of politicians on all aspects of this.