A modeling firm which has been projecting pandemic flu impact for the past three years says the current outbreak while growing is unlikely to cause big insurance losses.

And the disease will have less effect on countries with good health systems, said Newark, Calif.-based Risk Management Solutions.

The firm said it has been closely monitoring the New Variant Influenza A/H1N1, swine flu outbreak, which it said could be reasonably seen as having Category 2 severity on the 5-point Pandemic Severity Scale used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

“The insurance industry will be impacted in a number of ways��"there will be some increased mortality in life insurance portfolios, particularly in emerging markets, but our analyses show that there is only a small chance of this pandemic causing very substantial losses,” explained Dr. Andrew Coburn, RMS vice president of life and health risk research.