The scientists now say that the bird flu virus is mutating quickly

Along with the announcement that the British government is stocking up on the bird flu medicine Tamiflu the Secretary of Health Mr. Alan Johnson also said a National Pandemic Flu Framework has been set up to explain to the public how the nation will cope with a full on pandemic and how emergency workers will deal with the likelihood of large numbers of people dying from the H5N1 virus.

The British government is making plans to deal with the deaths of around 700,000 people. There is no way that British crematoriums and funeral houses could possibly cope with these amounts of bodies in a short time and therefore special orders have been made for inflatable mortuaries, crematoriums to be working overnight and even special “express funerals”. The government has even set aside areas to be used for mass graves should be huge burden of dead bodies becomes too much to manage. These new measures have been drafted after the previous Pandemic Flu Plan was criticised as having many weaknesses and for not being thorough and wide ranging enough.

The scientists now say that the bird flu virus is mutating quickly and that the world’s population should wake up to the realisation that at some point pretty soon there will be a full blown avian flu pandemic which will affect humans as well as birds.

The World Health Organisation has spoken to experts all around the world who have advised that the best thing is to be prepared. If governments act quickly to quarantine areas which have sick people and get Tamiflu to then immediately it is likely that the death toll will not be too dramatic. If on the other hand they are disorganised it is very possible that many thousands of people will die.

If a bird flu pandemic breaks out in the UK the government will probably advise people to stay indoors, not to go to work and to wash their hands regularly while looking out for symptoms of the deadly virus in themselves and in their families and friends.