Outbreak unlikely just yet: UK chief

By James Button
Europe Correspondent

October 18, 2005


A bird flu pandemic could kill 50,000 people in Britain but was unlikely to strike in the coming northern winter, according to the chief medical officer for England and Wales, Sir Liam Donaldson.

Speaking after laboratory tests confirmed that biological samples from poultry in Romania last week contained the H5N1 virus, a strain of avian influenza, Sir Liam compared the figure of 50,000 with the 12,000 Britons who die every year from flu.

The death toll could be as high as 750,000 but the lower figure was more realistic, he told the BBC. "It very much depends whether this mutated strain is a mild one or a more serious one."

Seeking to reduce growing alarm about bird flu, Sir Liam said there was no evidence the virus had mutated into a form that would pass from human to human - although he acknowledged that was a question of "when not if".

While the influenza epidemics of 1918, 1958 and 1968-9 suggested the bird flu virus would eventually combine with a human virus, becoming easily transmissible, "there is a lot we can do to prepare".

In 1968 "we didn't have some of the measures that we now have," he said. And the 1919 pandemic of Spanish flu, a strain of bird flu that killed 40 million people, occurred "before proper hospital facilities, before intensive care, before antibiotics".

Until the bird flu virus mutates into a form that can move between humans, scientists will be unable to develop a vaccine. Sir Liam said essential workers, including health workers, would be the first to get protection.

Health authorities would have to decide which people were most vulnerable - they would include the aged and the chronically ill. Yet the 1918 pandemic mainly struck the 20-40 age group.

The US has agreed to help Indonesia fight bird flu by upgrading laboratories and boosting surveillance, but it is worried about the concentration of chickens in places such as Jakarta.
