Pandemics are something employers should constantly be prepared for, not just when there?s an apparent risk, says a specialist who advises bosses on disaster preparedness.

?Pandemics are basically biological certainties, it is just a question of timing,? said Gisele Norris, a senior consultant for the National Healthcare Alternative Risk Practice at insurance broker and services company Aon, citing statistics that show deadly flu strains grip the world on average every three decades.

Company risk managers gathering for a 8,000-strong insurance conference sponsored last week by the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. were flooded with information on ways to prepare for a pandemic, by Aon, bigger rival Marsh & McLennan, and any number of firms peddling disaster and business continuity services.

And according to the World Health Organisation, and a former US Secretary of State, companies should be lining up for the services.

The WHO says a pandemic outbreak is inevitable and is pressing business to prepare. Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under former president Bill Clinton, carried a similar message to an audience gathered for an early morning session at the conference by Marsh.

?Being prepared for a crisis is never a waste of time,? Ms Albright told the group.

Most of the audience was gathered at the conference to consider issues specific to the insurance policies they buy to protect their companies from a range of possibly loss-producing risks. But where insurance products usually abound, there is a dearth of policies specific to a pandemic threat.

Ms Norris said that is slowly changing but preparedness is the essential first step to take. ?Aon sees this as a risk rather than an insurance event,? she said.

?Underwriters don?t have any sense of these risks,? she said, adding that Aon is working to help them ?see the threat in a way they are used to seeing?.

Most of the products that are in developments benefit the life insurance market, with several ?extreme mortality? bonds having hit investment markets in recent months.

Still Ms Norris said the insurance policy that will likely pay the biggest dividend for a business is basics like germ control standards ? from encouraging frequent hand-washing to setting up quarantine procedures, even if an employees travels to a vulnerable area.

The last pandemic was in 1968 and killed one million people around the world. Today?s threat could grow, either from the already identified H5N1 ?avian flu? strain, a mutation of that virus, or a new one altogether. However it plays out experts fear the death toll could reach or exceed the 1968 fatalities, and businesses could also be hit by absenteeism from illness and quarantine.

The risks are hard to gauge because mutations can create a virus that is partly recognisable, or completely different. That makes a vaccine harder to come up with, hence simple germ control methods being the best bet right now.

And some companies are readying for the pandemic, when it comes, to empty their offices. Bank HSBC Plc. is one example. Under its worst-case scenario, UK-based HSBC has projected the possibility of as much as half of its workforce across 50 countries being absent at any one time.

The ?avian flu?, or a new strain, won?t be considered pandemic until it infects one-quarter of the world. So far, the H5N1 strain has infected about 200. And of those, about 100 cases have been fatal. The virus is not yet at the stage of being easily passed from human to human.