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Complacency Isn't the Right Response to the Threat of Bird Flu Bird Flu

Posted on: Monday, 29 August 2005, 12:00 CDT

AT least as far back as Christmas 2004, the UK government knew that the British population was staring a potentially nightmarish threat to public health in the face with the spectre of bird flu claiming tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives in this country.

When the Sunday Herald reported the emergency plans being drawn up to cope with such a devastating outbreak, there was a general assumption that a vaccine would be available some time this year. We now know that is not the case.

As we report today, it is likely to take years before a vaccine suitable for humans can be made available to the public.

The US, which recently heralded a small breakthrough in the quest for a vaccine, is still many months away from refining a prototype of the drug into a medicine that would be fit and suitable for humans. Even when it does so, tests and safeguards will take time to implement . . . and nobody can say for sure how much time we have before disaster strikes, or if indeed it will strike.

The government's own emergency planners pulled no punches in internal documents leaked to the Sunday Herald about the devastating consequences of a bird flu pandemic in Britain. The worst-case scenario would see 1% of the population dead. That's 50,000 in Scotland and 600,000 in the UK. Globally, we could be looking at 100 million fatalities. Tamsin Rose, secretary-general of the European Public Health Alliance, says plainly of a global pandemic of bird flu:

"Millions and millions would die, and a pandemic would change society as we know it - and no-one seems prepared."

Potentially, thanks to the globalisation of travel and trade, a bird flu pandemic could make the 1918 influenza outbreak look like a trial run for worldwide mass death by disease. In 1918, some 50 million people died around the world.

Not only is society facing terrible human losses, but, as Rose hinted at, we are also facing a drastic shock to our way of life. The UK's emergency planners say clearly that a mass outbreak of the disease would cause untold social chaos.

Everything from travel restrictions to martial law is on the cards.

Of course, this nightmare scenario might never happen. Certainly the British government's response to the threat has been markedly low-key. The Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs believes that the possibility of bird flu infecting British citizens is remote. But, as Professor John Oxford argues in an article in today's Sunday Herald, Britain last year set aside GBP100 million for stocks of smallpox vaccine because there was the very remote chance of a bioterrorist spreading it.

Certainly other European governments are taking more positive steps. Holland, for instance, has ruled that domestic poultry must be kept indoors - a move so far dismissed as unnecessary by the British government.

The British approach would be easier to accept had we not already seen the complacency with which health officials and government ministers reacted to both mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth. Initial attempts to play down the scale of the crisis had to be abandoned as the full extent of the problems became known.

We have yet to be convinced that their reaction to bird flu is any more reliable.

The consequences of a pandemic seem so potentially catastrophic that everything possible should be done to reduce the possibility of it occurring. Following Holland's example seems a sensible first move.

Source: Sunday Herald

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