the bird flu pandemic could kill as many as 75,000 individuals in the UK

The United Kingdom government has warned that the world is not guarding itself sufficiently against the inevitable H5N1 influenza pandemic which could devastate the world and take as many as 50 million lives. In the House of Lords a committee set up to manage bird influenza protection said that the early warning systems for tracking emerging influenza strains were “poorly coordinated” and had “no vision or clarity.”

The particular report which was produced by the Lords Intergovernmental Organisations Committee actually criticised the World Health Organisation and said that they had been behaving in a dysfunctional manner and that much more needed to be done to improve rapid response initiatives. Government Ministers and many members of the House of Lords called for immediate action to improve the early warning systems in poor countries around the world so that outbreaks can be dealt with effectively and quickly before they spread and kill millions of people. It was noted that with so many millions of people travelling around the world on business and the pleasure the potential for the bird flu virus to spread very quickly was huge.

Government Ministers said that the bird flu pandemic could kill as many as 75,000 individuals in the United Kingdom. The report went on to say that the influenza pandemic is actually overdue and it is a question of when it will break out rather than if it will break out.

The Liberal Democrat Health spokesman Mr. Norman Lamb said that the threat of the bird flu pandemic was potentially much bigger than the threat of worldwide terrorism. He said that at present the worldwide response to the H5N1 influenza virus was “chaotic, uncoordinated and incoherent.”

The World Health Organisation has recommended that nations around the world stock up with enough of the influenza medication Tamiflu to treat a minimum of 25 percent of their populations, but some experts say that this is not enough and that quick government action in dealing with quarantining and preventing the spread of the virus would be much more effective than medication.