British bird flu outbreak a case of 'when, not if'

A CHILLING warning has come from the British Veterinary Association that an outbreak avian flu was a question of "when, not if" following the discovery in France of a dead duck carrying the disease.

"We will have to talk to people on a weekly, even an hourly basis as the situation develops," the association indicated at the weekend.

Leading virologists feel that the likelihood of an outbreak is high but the British Government insists that it is well prepared for any such contingency.

Elsewhere, health officials and farm workers slaughtered thousands of chickens in western India a day after the country's first reported outbreak of deadly bird flu.

Officials near the affected area reported that a 27-year-old poultry farm owner died of bird-flu-like symptoms. The case remained unconfirmed.

In Italy, a dead wild duck and six wild swans tested positive for the highly virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu, bringing the number of confirmed cases there to 16.

France was this weekend the seventh EU country to be confirm it had been hit by the disease, which can be passed to humans from contact with infected birds or faeces and which has claimed 91 lives since 2003.

In Britain, Animal Welfare Minister Ben Bradshaw revealed there had been an outbreak last autumn very similar to avian flu and it had been contained and eradicated very swiftly.

He said that while officials had a good plan to deal with any outbreak, they were keeping farmers and poultry keepers informed and were also asking the public to help identify any unusual dying off of wild birds.

So far, the British Government is not planning for mass vaccination of the country's 150 million poultry on the basis the efficiency of such vaccination had not been fully researched.

And as the lethal strain in birds spreads across Europe, fears are growing the disease could mutate into a form which is easily communicable from person to person, leading to a global human flu pandemic.

Professor of virology John Oxford said the likelihood of a human avian flu pandemic was "high and within a span of, say, 18 months".