Standard & Poor's (S&P) has warned that an avian flu pandemic would cause losses in nearly all insurance sectors: health, commercial insurance, life, life and property reinsurance, and retrocession.
S&P said that the industry's worst-case models for losses predicted overall worldwide losses of between $71.3bn and $200bn.
It said that if the avian flu does not achieve human-to-human transmission, most of the losses will be restricted to restaurants and poultry farmers worldwide.
However, it added that if the virus mutates into a human-to-human disease, every insurer might be at risk.
It said that a pandemic's effects could last for several months, and insurers, especially those with geographic concentrations in such areas, might find themselves exposed to an aggregation of losses not fully protected by reinsurance.
