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ILL PREPARED?
There’s nothing new about the pandemic threat, but as populations grow and diseases evolve, so too must the global response By Andy Swales
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AS THE MOSQUITO-BORNE ZIKA VIRUS spreads from Brazil through Latin America and beyond, the word “pandemic” is once again on risk managers’ lips. While there may be some debate over exactly when the term should be applied, its most basic definition is a disease that spreads worldwide or over a wide area, usually affecting a large number of people. Zika was labelled a “pandemic in progress” by US experts Anthony Fauci and David Morens in the New England Journal of Medicine in February. The virus – which, it is thought, can also be transmitted sexually – is often symptomless and causes relatively mild illness, according to the Australian Department of Health. But it also has been associated with insuranceNEWS
April/May 2016
severe congenital conditions such as microcephaly – abnormal smallness of the head – in babies born to infected mothers, and the onset of the autoimmune disease GuillainBarre syndrome. At the end of March the Zika outbreak had spread to Caribbean and Pacific nations, with isolated cases identified in countries including Australia and the US. The World Bank’s initial estimate in February for Zika’s economic impact this year in Latin America and the Caribbean is a “modest” $US3.5 billion, or 0.06% of GDP. It follows the horrific Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014-16 – with more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) – and several flu scares since 2005. No
