'No Panic' Over Bird Flu Threat (UK)

The public has been told not to panic over the threat of bird flu as the government has taken "all necessary measures", the defence secretary says. John Reid was speaking after the H5N1 strain was found in birds in France, Iran and India.

"It hasn't arrived [in the UK]. Don't let's panic. And I'm sure that the government has got all necessary measures there," he said.

"The difficulty if bird flu ever transfers to humans - and it hasn't yet, so don't let's panic - if it does, up until the point that it does and mixes with human flu it isn't possible to have a vaccine in advance," Mr Reid told BBC News.

"The most you can do is prepare and have a type of pill you take which diminishes the symptoms after it arrives."

The Conservatives are calling for a contingency planning exercise to test the UK's response to avian flu to be brought forward from April.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne said: "Given Bird Flu has been discovered in France, on our border... this should be brought forward. We should test our systems now.

"The other point I make is there needs to be much more public information here."

The H5N1 strain has killed dozens of people in Asia, the vast majority following very close contact with sick birds.

But some scientists fear it could mutate so that it could be passed easily from person to person.

Animal health minister Ben Bradshaw revealed that seven dead swans had tested negative in the last 24 hours and about 3,500 birds have been tested in the UK since October.

He urged the public to report any dead birds they see but stressed that the risk of bird flu arriving in the UK was "still low".

By law, anyone with 50 or more poultry has until 28 February to register on the Great Britain Poultry Register, which was begun in December.

Experts said the risk was higher than before the French case was confirmed on Saturday.

The Medical Research Council said it was not "inevitable" that bird flu would arrive in the UK.

Council chief executive Professor Colin Blakemore said: "The risk assessment suggests that certainly the probability is a little higher than we thought a few weeks ago."

Flu is not transmitted by eating poultry, as "what seems to be required at the moment for these rare human cases seems to be very intimate, close contact between humans and infected chickens," he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme.

The British Veterinary Association said surveillance of wild birds was being increased in response to the confirmed case in France.

Its President Dr Freda Scott Park told Radio 4's The World This Weekend: "We're going to push the surveillance levels of wild birds up again.

"And we're going to have to talk to people on a daily even an hourly basis just to see how the situation develops".

Chemist retailer Boots has revealed it is to train staff in recognising the human symptoms of avian flu to assist customers with their enquiries.

Virologist John Oxford said the UK was equipped to deal with an outbreak, but officials were "not prepared to act to stop one coming in the first place".

Prof Oxford, from the Queen Mary's School of Medicine in London, told the BBC the government should act to prevent contact between wild and domestic birds.

He said: "Some countries in Europe are better organised, I think, and those countries are particularly Holland and France."

While he said agricultural officials in the UK would be very well organised in dealing with an outbreak, "but the great gaping chasm seems to me they're not prepared to act to stop one coming in the first place."

Bird flu 'to arrive in Britain this week'

Andrew Alderson, James Orr and Kim Willsher in Paris
The Telegraph (UK)
(Filed: 19/02/2006)

Fears were growing last night that bird flu will reach Britain within days, after the deadly H5N1 form of the virus swept across Europe, the Middle East and south-east Asia yesterday.

The Government conceded yesterday that it is now increasingly likely that bird flu will arrive in Britain, as the National Farmers' Union (NFU) told members to prepare to take poultry indoors at short notice.

Samples from a duck that died of bird flu near Lyon, in France, have been sent for tests to a laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, but French officials have already said that there is a 90 per cent chance it was the deadly H5N1 strain. The results are expected today.

French officials are also testing two more dead ducks found in a wildlife reserve at the mouth of the Somme river near the north coast. If they are found to have died from the H5N1 virus, then deadly bird flu is just 60 miles from Britain.

Austrian officials disclosed yesterday that H5N1 has been detected in Vienna. The discovery of the virus in a dead swan follows earlier confirmation that it was found elsewhere in the country.

Iranian authorities have also revealed that 135 dead swans found in the northern province of Gilan have tested positive for the H5N1 strain. This is the first time the virus has been detected in the Islamic republic.

Meanwhile, India has confirmed the country's first outbreak in chickens. It is preparing to cull up to 500,000 birds in an attempt to contain the outbreak. In a worrying development, it is also testing eight humans for H5N1.

Over the past decade, H5N1 has spread from Asia to Europe and Africa. The first occurrence in humans was in Hong Kong in 1997. Since then, it has infected 169 people, killing at least 91. Millions of birds have been destroyed.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that the discovery of bird flu in France "increases the likelihood" of it arriving here.

"We have robust surveillance measures in place and have taken more than 3,500 samples from wild birds, which so far have not detected H5N1 in the UK," said Fred Landeg, Britain's deputy chief veterinary officer. Defra would continue to monitor the situation, he said, and encouraged the public to report unusual wild bird deaths.

The NFU believes that farmers will be able to bring their poultry flocks indoors within a day if necessary. Farmers have also been asked to look out for any dead or sick-looking birds.

Authorities in France, the seventh European Union country to be hit by the disease, have applied emergency containment measures set out by the EU as an obligation on all countries hit by bird flu outbreaks.

All the outbreaks discovered in the EU so far have involved wild birds - believed to be migratory swans and ducks.

EU rules dictate that a country must establish a three-kilometre protection zone around the outbreak and a surrounding "surveillance zone" of an extra seven kilometres.

But concerns are growing, about the difficulty of controlling the spread if commercial birds - poultry on farms - catch the virus.

Scientists' biggest fear is that the virus will mutate, thus acquiring the ability to pass from person to person, and lead to a pandemic that could claim millions of lives. British experts last night said that the spread of the deadly virus to France could now have "major implications" for the shooting industry.

Simon Clarke, from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, said that up to 50 per cent of pheasants reared for shooting in Britain were bought in France. The potential spread of the H5N1 virus in France could halt the import of chicks to Britain, forcing estates to rely on limited numbers of locally reared birds.

The British Government has drawn up plans to set up the required exclusion zone if any wild bird is found to be infected with H5N1. Inside the zone, all poultry movements would be halted, and if any poultry was found to be infected the entire flock would face being culled.

The Government is still deciding whether to vaccinate the country's entire stock of 150 million poultry. Vaccination ought to slow the spread of the virus, but it could lead to the rest of the world banning the import of poultry from EU countries.

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