BRITAIN: A bird flu pandemic is inevitable but unlikely to strike Britain this winter, the chief medical officer for England and Wales, Sir Liam Donaldson, said yesterday in an attempt to talk up the British government's preparedness for the infection, but talk down its imminence.
He said contingency planning was based on an estimate that a new strain of flu mutating from infection in the bird population could kill about 50,000 people in the UK, compared with about 12,000 flu-related deaths in a normal winter.
"But it could be a lot higher than that," Sir Liam told BBC TV. "It very much depends whether this mutated strain is a mild one or a more serious one."
After criticism that government ministers had been slow to prepare medical defences, he said Britain was one of the few countries to have begun stockpiling the most effective antiviral drugs at "a very early stage".
He conceded that France started earlier, but said Britain was well ahead of the US.
The British department of health had ordered 14 million doses of the Tamiflu drug to tackle bird flu, with 2.5 million doses acquired so far and the rest coming at 800,000 a month. "We can't make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, but we can limit its impact," he said.
Sir Liam said history suggested the bird flu virus would combine with a human virus, becoming easily transmissible. It had happened in 1918, 1958 and 1968-69, following "natural cycles" of mutation that produced new strains for which people did not have natural immunity. "There is a lot we can do to prepare," he said. "If we look back to the last pandemic, in 1968-69, we didn't have some of the measures that we now have, like antiviral drugs."
These were "very different times" to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 in which 40 million people died worldwide, including 250,000 in the UK.
Higher estimates of deaths up to 750,000 from a future pandemic were "not impossible", but more realistic estimates were a lot lower.
Asked if the problem would hit in the coming months, Sir Liam said: "I think it is less likely that it will come this winter." Officials said farmers were given expanded bio-security and risk assessment advice over the weekend, while GPs got advice on what to do in the event of a pandemic.