The UK government is to build up a stockpile of millions of doses of an antiviral drug as its first line of defence against a likely influenza pandemic.
Figure 1.
Scientists from a joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization conference on avian flu tour a chicken farm in Vietnam
Credit: RICHARD VOGEL/AP
The order for 14.6 million courses of oseltamivir was announced this week along with a contingency plan to deal with an expected outbreak. In the United Kingdom about 50 000 people or more could be affected by the disease, said the health secretary, John Reid.
The World Health Organization is warning that a flu pandemic is likely to emerge from South East Asia, where a current outbreak of avian flu, known as H5N1 (a strain of influenza A virus), has spread at an unprecedented rate. It has so far affected nine countries and is proving difficult to eliminate.
To date, 55 people have been infected with the same virus, of whom 42 have died. Symptoms have ranged from conjunctivitis to typical flu-like symptoms.
Although the virus is currently not able to pass easily from person to person, it could mutate with a human flu virus, producing a new virus capable of spreading easily and causing a pandemic.
Launching the UK Pandemic Contingency Plan, Mr Reid said it would be impossible for the United Kingdom to avoid a pandemic. “We have reason to expect that a flu pandemic will have an affect that will be four times higher than normal seasonal flu, but it could be higher.”
Treating the most severe cases with oseltamivir would be the main weapon against disease until a vaccine is developed, a process that would take up to six months from the beginning of the outbreak, he said.
Mr Reid said the order for oseltamivir was based on estimates that one in four of the UK population could be affected by the disease.
The Pandemic Contingency Plan is published at www.dh.gov.uk