As for investing defenses against flu effects, the report also mentions gold and t-bills as safe havens.

Thanks for mentioning this book, I’ve read several about the H5N1 virus, but not in regard to investing.

On a more serious note… Other than travel & tourism which are negatively impacted and health care which is positively impacted, I also don’t think there’s any sort of investment thesis to be had on global pandemics or outbreaks.

For the record, I’m not making any changes other than washing hands more often than usual. Put this post down to spending time on Wikipedia and reading up on past pandemics. Scary stuff.

As much I love to rag on the media, and as much as the media probably over-reacted (which had a very negative impact on Toronto’s tourism business that year), SARS did certainly have the capability to become much worse than it was, it was a scary time. It was a disease that was very contagious — one estimate is that the chance of catching it was 6% every time you walked into an infected person’s room with a surgical mask on (which is what lead to the switch to the so-called SARS masks). It had a fairly high death rate, even amongst initially healthy people.

The quarantine steps worked, however, and it was contained largely to the health care setting.