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Bird Flu 'Likely to Kill 50,000'

Posted on: Monday, 17 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

By John-Paul Ford Rojas

The Government's chief medical officer yesterday warned that a bird flu pandemic could cause 50,000 deaths in the UK.

But Sir Liam Donaldson told the BBC's Sunday AM programme the figure could be "a lot higher" depending on the seriousness of the strain of the virus.

He said it was a question of "when not if" although it was "less likely" that the problem would hit this winter.

Officials announced that samples of Romanian bird flu being tested this weekend in a British laboratory did contain the deadly H5N1 virus.

However, further results are needed to find out whether it is similar to the particularly lethal strain which has been found in Turkey and Asia.

Scientists fear that H5N1 could genetically mutate into a form which is easily passed from human to human, sparking a global pandemic.

Around 60 people in Asia have died from the virus since 2003. Sir Liam told the BBC yesterday that more than 12,000 people die annually with the normal winter flu. "But if we had a pandemic, the problem would be that our existing vaccines don't work against it, we would have to develop a new vaccine, and people don't have natural immunity because it hasn't been around before," he said.

"So the estimate we are working to in the number of deaths is around 50,000 excess deaths from flu.

"But it could be a lot higher than that, it very much depends whether this mutated strain is a mild one or a more serious one."

History suggested the bird flu virus would combine with a human virus, becoming easily transmissible.

It had happened in 1918, 1958 and 1968/69, and came in "natural cycles" with the flu virus every 10 to 40 years mutating into a strain for which people did not have natural immunity.

Sir Liam added: "It is when (not if). But there is a lot we can do to prepare. If we look back to the last pandemic in 1968/69, we didn't have some of the measures that we now have, like anti-viral drugs." The Government is trying to amass 14 million doses of the Tamiflu drug to tackle bird flu with 2.5 million amassed so far and the rest coming in at a rate of 800,000 a month.

Sir Liam claimed Britain was one of the few countries to have embarked on the stockpiling at "a very early stage" and it was part of a "comprehensive plan".

"We can't make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, it will come. But what we can do is to limit its impact," he said.

These were "very different times" to the Spanish flu of 1918/19 where 40 million died worldwide including 250,000 in the UK "before proper hospital facilities, before intensive care, before antibiotics".

Higher estimates of deaths up to 750,000 from a future pandemic were "not impossible" although Sir Liam added: "I think it is more realistic that the figure will be a lot lower than that." In the event of a pandemic measures would include developing a vaccine and deploying anti-viral drugs, which would reduce severity in the first 24 to 48 hours of the disease and stop some people dying from it.

Measures such as controlling movement of populations would only be necessary at the "absolute peak of an epidemic in this country".

Source: The Journal - Newcastle-upon-Tyne

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