# 3455
Late last year Lloyd’s insurance issued a pandemic impact report for the Insurance industry, which can be downloaded here.
You’ll find my comments on this report in an essay entitled The Lloyds Report: A Closer Look.
Last march, just a month before the novel H1N1 virus was first detected in San Diego and Mexico, the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) released a new report by Trevor Maynard, Emerging Risks Manager at Lloyd’s, entitled Pandemics: Be Prepared.
You’ll find my blog on this report, at Insurance Industry `Thinkpiece’ On Pandemic Preparedness.
Despite these, and other warnings, for most big companies the threat of a pandemic had pretty much fallen off the radar scope in 2009.
Many companies, suffering from pandemic-warning fatigue, had all but discounted the possibility of one happening.
Lloyds has issued a new Spotlight On Risk report today, on the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic. It’s well worth reading, as are the two previous reports.
Spotlight on risk: H1N1, Swine flu
8 July 2009
A rendering of an influenza virus
The H1N1 ‘swine flu’ pandemic, which has sparked widespread fear and disruption across the globe, has shone a spotlight on a risk that many companies have disregarded in the past few years.
The threat of a pandemic has fallen down most companies’ list of major risks since the outbreak of SARS in Asia in 2003.
Issues such as the recession, increasing regulation and climate change have dominated risk discussions in company boardrooms, at the expense of a risk that last occurred 40 years ago.
Off the risk radar
“Some companies don’t have very well thought-out plans, because it’s off their risk radar,” says Julia Graham, Chief Risk Officer of DLA Piper, and the person heading AIRMIC’s swine flu initiative.
“Ever since SARS there have been lots of warnings that a pandemic would soon come, but one never did. As a result, many companies came to think it wasn’t ever going to happen… Other issues have gone up their list of priorities,” Graham says.
