Expert allays bird flu fears (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Expert allays bird flu fears

WILTSHIRE is well prepared to react should there be an outbreak of bird flu, according to Dr Mark Evans.

Dr Evans, consultant in communicable disease control, is head of the Health Protection Agency in Wiltshire, which will co-ordinate the county's response to bird flu or pandemic flu which is feared could kill hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

As yet there has been no cases of bird flu in Britain, but the strain has recently been identified in Romania and Turkey. Before that the strain had been confined to south east Asia.

Since 2003, 60 people who have caught the infection after having direct contact with infected birds have died.

Dr Evans said: "There has been no cases of avian flu in the UK. The experts consider the risk of it spreading here to be low but should it happen then treatment will be very fast with anti viral drugs.

"There is a monitoring system in place which includes not only what is happening in Asia, with close links with the World Health Organisation, but we also have regular input from sources in the UK such as GPs, NHS Direct and laboratory reports."

Dr Evans said he and his colleagues in Wiltshire and his counterparts across the UK had been planning for an outbreak of pandemic flu since March this year.

In Wiltshire Dr Evans has been having regular meetings with representatives from local authorities, the Primary Care Trusts, the acute hospitals, police, fire and ambulance, the Army and Environment Agency. Updated guidance was due to be released by the Department for Health yesterday.

He said the UK was one of the best prepared countries for pandemic flu and said it was stockpiling the anti viral vaccine, Tamiflu.

He said: "There are 2.5 million courses of Tamiflu available in the UK and that is being increased by 800,000 courses every month. The stockpiling is being built up to have enough to treat a quarter of the population, a figure based on previous pandemics."

Dr Evans said the Department for Health had ruled that health care workers and essential service personnel were priority groups to receive a vaccine.

He said extending vaccinations would depend on the virulence of the particular flu strain and the age group affected.

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said on Monday 50,000 people could die in Britain from pandemic flu compared with 12,000 flu related deaths every year.

Britain's last pandemic flu outbreak was in 1968 and killed an estimated 30,000 people, and one million people worldwide.

Dr Evans encouraged people who are eligible for a flu jab to get one. These are people aged over 65 and those that have chronic conditions.

He said the ordinary flu jab would not protect people against pandemic flu but said it was still important for those at risk to get their flu jab.

Scientists fear migrating birds could bring the bird flu virus to the UK and the Government's chief vet Dr Debby Reynolds said Defra had enhanced its surveillance of wild birds.

She added: "Any suspicion of disease should be reported immediately. All poultry keepers must strengthen their biosecurity and make a plan to protect the health of their birds."

As a precautionary measure the UK has banned imports of live chickens from the affected countries. The European Commission has banned imports of all poultry, poultry meat products and eggs from Thailand.

Fact file

Bird flu, known as H5N1, is a new strain of flu to which humans have no immunity.

An anti viral drug, Tamiflu, is thought to be effective provided it is taken in the early stages or as a preventative treatment.

It spreads from birds to birds and in some rare cases from birds to humans. The danger is if the strain develops the ability to spread from human to human.

Humans can develop the disease by coming into contact with infected birds or their faeces.

Symptoms are similar to other types of flu, such as fever, malaise, sore throats and coughs. More severe infections can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory diseases.

The first documented case of bird flu in people appeared in Hong Kong in 1997 when 18 people were infected and six of those died. The strain was all but eradicated after mass culling but the next outbreak was detected in south east Asia in December 2003.

A total of 117 people have been infected with bird flu and of these 60 have died. These have occurred in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

It has since spread to Russia, Turkey and Romania.