Date published: 2005/03/13
The BBC says:
Government plans to tackle a predicted bird flu pandemic have been attacked by a scientist who fears an outbreak could kill two million people in the UK.
Professor Hugh Pennington, president of the Society for General Microbiology, criticised ministers' "optimism" and said a vaccine needs to be ordered now.
Experts predict bird flu will mutate with human flu leading to a pandemic.
The government says its plans to tackle an outbreak - which include stockpiling antiviral drugs - are comprehensive.
Bird flu has killed at least 47 people in South East Asia over 15 months and there are suspected cases of the virus being passed between humans.
The World Health Organization (WHO) fears 100 million people could be killed worldwide - the 1918 pandemic killed 50 million, including more than 200,000 in the UK.
Professor Pennington, who says the 2 million death toll is an estimate, said: "They (the government) are being very optimistic about how they see it developing over the next year or two.
"We know that the virus, when it gets into people - which doesn't happen very often but has happened in the Far East - is very, very lethal, much more than the ordinary kind of flu virus that we're used to," he told BBC News 24.
"If it does that and it keeps this ability to kill, where it kills between 60% and 80% of the people it infects, that's were these big numbers of deaths come from."
In an interview with the Independent on Sunday, he said the government hoped the problem would "go away" and likened its attitude to the BSE crisis.
...
However, BBC medical correspondent Fergus Walsh said Professor Pennington's estimation could be too low.He said, based on WHO estimates that one in four Britons could become infected and a mortality rate of 75%, the figure would be about 11 million.
The government says vaccines cannot be prepared for any human-to-human outbreak as it is not known what form the virus would take and how it would mutate.
But Prof Pennington said the structure of the virus had not changed a great deal in recent years and countries such as the US were already ordering supplies.
He said that while it may never be needed, Britain could get stuck "in a queue" for a vaccine if it waits too long.
Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Liam Donaldson has previously said: "The plan set out recently outlines many other steps which will be needed to reduce the pandemic's impact.
"The NHS and the government are taking steps to ensure we are as well prepared as we can be to cope with this."
Yet another article claiming the world is about to end. The general public has no way of knowing whether this is just more alarmist nonsense or a real threat.
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