While individuals are becoming more and more concerned about the possibility of bird flu becoming a fully fledged pandemic, businesses don't seem to be as concerned.
On one side this is understandable since a business cannot catch bird flu itself, however, its employees can.
Where a large business might be able to weather the loss of a portion of its staff, the equivalent loss from a smaller company can be crippling.
The industry that is most concerned with the bird flu problems is the poultry industry since it is directly affected.
Those industries that are directly related to the poultry industry are also seen to be taking far more precautions since the latest outbreak in Suffolk.
Apart from the high mortality rate of bird flu, one of the biggest problems for employers is the speed with which the infection can spread between people.
This only becomes a problem once the disease has made the leap from birds to humans.
In addition to that the disease exacts a horrific toll on the body of those who contract it, which means that the amount of time they remain off work is elongated.
These two factors exacerbate one another since one infected person can bring the disease into the workplace and spread it among their colleagues.
This is a problem where ever a group of people remains in close contact with one another on a daily basis.
This leads to a large number of a business's workforce being off sick for a protracted period of time.
This would normally lead to the business recruiting temp workers, but with bird flu, this might be nearly impossible.
The overall workforce would shrink drastically once the infection takes hold, particularly in larger cities like London and Manchester.
The high rate of fatality would contribute to a permanently diminished work force, leading to higher salaries for those who remain.
These increases could lead to a bidding war for those remaining employees who are good at the job they do.
Either a SME could bankrupt itself bidding for those workers who have not contracted bird flu or it could be stuck with ineffective employees.
In either situation the company would be adversely affected and would be more susceptible to external factors causing the company to go under.
These are definite possibilities with the threat of bird flu looming so large, but a surprising number of businesses, both small and large, have not laid any contingency plans in place to deal with the potential advent of bird flu.
This is something that needs to be addressed.