The present stocks of the Tamiflu drug in the UK don't plan for this eventuality

A group of senior government advisers has said that the United Kingdom’s stockpiles of influenza drugs which are there to control a full on bird flu pandemic are too low and must be added to if the government is serious about lowering the number of people who could die from the disease should it break out.

The Pandemic Influenza Scientific Advisory Group reckons that the UK government should at least buy three times more doses of Tamiflu than they now have.  At present the United Kingdom government has just fewer than 15 million individual courses of the bird flu drug Tamiflu and this is planned to cover 25 percent of the British population. The Pandemic Influenza Scientific Advisory Group say that almost 45 million individual courses should be at hand to fully protect all UK citizens so that more like 75 percent of the population would be sure to be given Tamiflu.

They went on to say that in an ideal situation when a person was known to be suffering from the H5N1 bird flu virus they would immediately be given Tamiflu. On top of this their whole family and anyone they had been in contact with them would also be given the drug as a preventative measure. The present stocks of the Tamiflu drug in the United Kingdom do not plan for this eventuality and are only designed to treat the individuals who are confirmed as having the deadly virus.

At present as the bird flu virus has not actually broken out there is no way of telling how dangerous it would be and how contagious it would become. Scientists around the world are confirming that the bird flu virus is changing and that it will get to a point where the virus is easily transferred between humans and that is when it will be extremely dangerous. But as to exactly when the virus will mutate into this deadly form……nobody knows.