[A-List] FW: Avian flu in Britain

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Ian Murray

**********************


http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=619562 

Bird flu could kill 2 million Britons
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

13 March 2005

Two million Britons could die in the bird flu pandemic that experts warn is
both imminent and inevitable, one of the country's leading authorities has
told The Independent on Sunday.

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General
Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University,
also criticised the the Government's "optimistic" attitude to a potentially
devastating pandemic, likening it to official complacency over BSE a decade
ago.

In the starkest warning yet over the potentially devastating impact of the
pandemic, Professor Pennington said that the number of deaths has been
greatly underestimated. He expects the flu - like the 1918 pandemic which
killed more people than the First World War - to cause the deaths of many
people from pneumonia "which we are still not very good at treating".

He said: "If the virus moves into people there will be no stopping it. It
will be here before we know it." Ministers have sought to play down the
potential impact of bird flu by saying that only some 50,000 people would
die in Britain. But this has already been contradicted by Scotland's chief
medical officer, who says it would be 10 times worse.

Yesterday Vietnamese health officials revealed that a 41-year-old nurse who
had cared for a bird flu victim in the country's northern Thai Binh province
had contracted the disease, increasing fears that it is beginning to spread
from person to person. She is the second nurse in a week to have gone down
with the flu, which until now has mainly been caught from poultry. Experts
have long warned that illness in health workers would be the first sign that
the disease had begun to be infectious in humans, bringing a pandemic much
closer.

Pandemics occur when a new virus, to which no one is immune, spreads rapidly
among people. Experts are unanimous that this will inevitably happen with
bird flu, though they are unable to predict when. The World Health
Organisation said: "The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a
pandemic." Ministers admit that a pandemic would "rapidly" reach Britain
thanks to air travel, and could not be prevented from spreading. They have
ordered 14.6 million courses of an anti-viral drug, the only defence at
present available.

But, as The Independent on Sunday revealed last week, the drugs will take up
to two years to arrive. Professor Pennington is worried about the length of
time and accused the Government of being "very relaxed" about the
possibility of a pandemic. "They hope that by the time they have to spend
money the problem will have gone away," he said. "It is rather reminiscent
of BSE."

The Government expects one in every four people in the country to catch the
flu, if the pandemic breaks out. But it officially predicts the death toll
at "around 50,000" and stresses that this would be no more than the four
times the normal annual flu death rate.

This appears to be based on two highly optimistic assumptions. First, it
assumed that it will kill only 0.37 per cent of those it infects, an
estimate based on normal flu. Second, the figure is based on just one wave
of the flu.