British doctors gear up for bird flu pandemic
Doctors’ surgeries across Britain will receive instructions next month to prepare for a feared pandemic of bird flu amid concerns the deadly disease could spread across Europe.
Information packs will include a 50-page technical guide to help doctors identify cases of bird flu and guidelines on containing an outbreak of the virus that has killed more than 50 people in southeast Asia since 2003.
The packs, which will also contain leaflets for the public, form part of the government’s planned response to a potential flu pandemic as agreed with the World Health Organisation.
“The timing of the distribution reflects the production cycle and does not signify a heightened state of alert,” said the Department of Health in a statement on Friday.
The department said there had been no cases of human-to-human transmission of bird flu, which would signal the start of a pandemic.
But health authorities fear the virus could spread to Europe following mass bird deaths in a Russian region to the west of the Ural Mountains this week and as tens of millions of birds continue to migrate to warmer climates in coming months.
Avian influenza in humans
Of the 15 subtypes known, only subtypes H5, H7 and H9 are known to be capable of crossing the species barrier from birds to humans. It is feared that if the avian influenza virus undergoes antigenic shift with a human influenza virus, the new subtype created could be both highly contagious and highly lethal in humans. Such a subtype could cause a global influenza pandemic, similar to the Spanish Flu that killed over 20 million people in 1918 (though a variety of sources quote average figures even higher, up to 100 million in some cases). Many health experts are concerned that a virus that mutates to the point where it can cross the species barrier (i.e. from birds to humans) will inevitably mutate to the point where it can be transmitted from human to human. It is at that point that a pandemic becomes likely.
The WHO on Thursday called for tight checks in Russia and Kazakhstan to detect any further bird flu outbreaks among poultry.
The U.N. agency expressed concern about the “expanding geographical presence” of the deadly H5N1 virus beyond southeast Asia, but said that no human cases had been detected in either former Soviet republic.
The Dutch agriculture ministry on Friday ordered all poultry to be kept indoors from Monday to prevent contact with migrating birds that could spread the disease from Russia.
Revision date: July 5, 2011
Last revised: by Jorge P. Ribeiro, MD