The sudden outbreak of swine flu in Mexico should serve as a warning to businesses to make sure their business continuity plans are up to date and understood by their employees, according to Alex Hindson, head of enterprise risk management at Aon Global Risk Consulting.

Employees should be both trained and confident that they can deal with an emergency, Hindson said. Organizations should also ensure they can cope with worker absences. And they should consider the advantages of remote working and be aware of the dangers of bad hygiene, he added.

“We’re focusing on not panicking, this being very much a wake-up call,” Hindson said.

Too many business interruption plans concentrate on premises and information technology systems, Hindson said, when the real asset is people.

Failure to consider business interruption issues can damage the trust that customers, employees and insurers have in an organization, Hindson said. People “may well have second thoughts [about] working with you if you’re not clear what you’re doing,” he said.

Hindson, who is based in London, said he is unsure if this message is getting through. He recalled the excitement that was generated by the avian flu scare of a couple of years ago. “And it never happened,” he said of that disease. “So people kind of went on to the next major issue. This may just remind them that this is always here.”

Asked how much economic damage the current outbreak might cause, Hindson said: “We don’t know. That’s the honest answer.”

The extent of the disease itself may become more apparent in coming days after a period of incubation, said Hindson, who expressed concern that the swine flu has occurred at a time of global economic uncertainty.


“The world economy is pretty brittle at the moment,” Hindson said, with businesses suffering from weaknesses in cash flow, inventories and supply chains.

Hindson noted a report that a British businessman has been quarantined in his own house in the United Kingdom. He also cited events related to the disease in Europe and Brazil, Australia.

“Individually, we may well see people being ill,” Hindson said. “It probably doesn’t take a lot of media coverage for people to start getting worried.”

As swine flu echoes fears of Southeast Asian bird flu, Hindson said, it has underlined the need for businesses to be resilient. He suggested the U.K. government has a plan to deal with a pandemic. “Whether people actually understand it or are comfortable with it is a different matter,” he said. “I think at an individual company level it’s much more patchy.”

Hindson’s focus is on providing consultancy to business clients. He believes that insurers have already excluded these risks, just as they excluded war and nuclear perils. The main remaining insurance cover, he said, is on the life and benefit side where cover is available in such areas as business travel, personal accident and health.

“The ability to buy business interruption cover for this particular issue is pretty limited,” Hindson said. “The horse bolted on that one a little while ago.”

Aon Global Risk Consulting is part of Aon Corp. (NYSE: AOC), which is ranked by Best's Review as the world's largest insurance broker.