Bird Flu Could
Kill Millions
By Geoffrey Lean
13 March 2005
The
Independent
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.
©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.