Life insurance and bird flu pandemic

"The sky's falling in" said Chicken Licken...

It probably won't happen + all insurance companies are crooks so they won't pay out even after sending the premiums sky-high just in case.

Have a laugh and help blind computer users. Buy CDs of Les Barker's hilarious poems, read by well-known people.

Don't you realise? There's nothing to worry about. The press and everybody else whipping up hysteria and spreading the fear want you to pay for life insurance and higher premiums and so-on.

One thing sells better than sex: Fear.

People seem to worry about things they see on the news like terrorism & bird flu, but they forget the *real* risks like dying of cancer, heart disease or on the roads.

These "real" risks are the reason why I have had a todo to get life insurance for quite a while. Unfortunately I am quite a procrastinator.

I only really want cover during the period it would be most helpful to my children if they lost one or both parents.

However, the bird flu craze has made me realise how bad I am with respect to this procrastination, so the right thing to do is get life insurance, as opposed to procrastinating some more. The cause of the final nudge is irrelevant, once a decision to take out insurance has been made.

I actually don't think I or my wife will die of pandemic flu. In fact, I'd say that the governments lower estimates are looking quite realistic (50000 in 60m, not to be worried about). There are various reasons why my family would not even come close to being at risk.

I actually don't believe I or my wife will die of the other real risks , certainly not until my children are older anyhow. However, for the next 5 years or so, a death of one of us would be eased considerably by the right policy.

When I investigated this 6 months ago I based my response on the 1918 out break which killed 228,000 out of ~43m or about 0.53% of the UK population. Projecting the figures forward to todays ~60m population gives 318,000 deaths.

Tier 1 capital ratio ?

Daytona

Thanks for the latter link and idea.

I also did the calculation of approximate deaths assuming a similar percentage dying as in the 1918 pandemic but feel it is likely to be an overestimate, assuming the nature of the disease was equivalent. I'm optimistic that 87 years of technological progress will help things.

And the complete erosion of the usefulness of antibiotic for the secondary infections which'll get you.

*if* it mutates into a freely transmitable human tio human killer flu then we're doomed. Flu experts say we're overdue a pandemic.

If its all just hype and not real then would one expect to find cronyism alive and well in the firms which profit?

An acquaintance of mine, in his forties and with 5 young children, took out life assurance in July and in September he was hit by a car and killed as he was walking along the pavement.

Rob Graham

They didn't have antibiotics in 1918, penicillin was discovered in the late twenties (1928?) and only became really useful several years later. So from the antibiotics point of view things were worse in

1918.

I reckon we're about the same. Antibiotics won't cure the flu - but they are needed to treat secondary infections such as pneumonia. Do we have massive stockpiles of them, will they work? and do we have an unbreakable system to deliver the treatment people need? I believe hospitals are under massive strain already from budget restrictions and can't see things working under pressure.

600,000 people die each year in the UK alone!

Don't die alone: try to take a passenger with you!

FoFP