Only one confirmed bird flu case in Britain

FEARS of a widespread outbreak of bird flu across Britain were receding last night as an infected swan found in Scotland remained the only confirmed case of the deadly H5N1 strain.

Laboratories will remain open today to test carcasses, but the swan discovered in Cellardyke, Fife, was the only positive case of more than 1,100 birds examined since the end of February, officials said.

A spokeswoman for Britain's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said there were currently no 'report' cases - those which are suspected of bird flu and prioritised for testing.

Yesterday, newspapers reported that a government adviser had warned that a bird flu pandemic among humans could kill 100,000 children in Britain.

The Sunday Times quoted British government health adviser Liam Donaldson as saying in a confidential letter to the schools minister that if the virus was particularly severe, deaths among school-age children "could be as high as 100,000".

"This would mean that potentially 50,000 deaths might be prevented by school closures," Dr Donaldson was quoted as saying.

"For this reason, I would recommend that schools should be planning on the basis that they may have to close for part or all of the pandemic," he said.

The overall death toll in Britain in a severe outbreak of the disease could be as high as 700,000, the Sunday Times quoted Dr Donaldson as writing.

But yesterday, the British government's top scientific adviser David King said bird flu was "absolutely not" present among poultry in Britain, adding that he was "fairly optimistic" about its absence from the wild bird population.

He emphasised that, to date, only one dead bird had been washed ashore with H5N1 - and this may have come from an area of Europe that had previously been infected.

"The one swan doesn't mean it has arrived here. We need to see more evidence of spread before we can say that it has arrived in the UK," he said.

Experts at the Central Science Laboratory in York were continuing DNA tests on the dead swan, which was found washed up in the harbour of the coastal town of Cellardyke, in an effort to determine its exact species.

The bird was found in an advanced state of decay, with its head missing, making it hard to identify.

Finding out which species the bird was will help epidemiologists know if it was migratory and where it might have come from.

Until that information is available, Defra is refusing to speculate on how the animal may have picked up the disease.

Despite leaked documents showing plans for closing schools and dealing with food shortages in the event of a human flu pandemic, the government also sought to reassure the public that the chance of the bird virus mutating into a form that can be transferred from human to human was "very low".

So far, more than 100 people worldwide have died of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of the disease, but all have been in close proximity to infected poultry.

Speaking on ITV1, Dr King acknowledged a mutation could trigger a global pandemic, but said any suggestion this was inevitable was "totally misleading".

He said: "The pandemic flu that we are now talking about would be in the human population. It is not in the human population at the moment.

"So yes, the government is preparing for that possibility, but I would say it's a very low possibility. I don't believe it is inevitable."

Concerns about bird flu appear to be receding among the British public, with Defra reporting a drop in the number of calls to its hotline over the weekend.

On Saturday, there were 1,250 callers from all over Britain, around half the number who called on Friday.

A Defra spokeswoman said 900 of the calls did not meet the criteria for further investigation.