Geoffrey Lean: It is a bigger risk than terrorism or anything Mother Nature could throw at us
Sunday, 16 October 2005
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It takes a leap of the imagination to grasp the scale of the threat posed by bird flu. Living at a time of unprecedented technical progress - witnessing regular breakthroughs in the fight against horrific killers such as cancer - it is hard to believe that familiar old flu could prove to be a devastating plague.
But experts agree that we face exactly that. Lee Jong-wook, the director general of the World Health Organisation, calls it "the most serious health threat facing the world".
The Government's official emergency body, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, has officially warned the Cabinet that it poses as big as threat to Britain as terrorism. And its Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, said this month that it was a "biological inevitability" that it would seriously affect the country.
Professor John Oxford of Queen Mary, University of London, one of the world's leading flu authorities, likens it to "a tsunami rushing towards us". Tommy Thompson, when retiring as US health secretary early this year, called it a "really huge bomb".
And Professor Michael Osterholm, a key adviser on bioterrorism to the Bush administration, says: "I cannot think of any other risk, terrorism or Mother Nature included, that could potentially pose a greater risk to society than this."
Flu pandemics occur several times a century, when a wholly new strain of the disease - to which no one has any immunity - emerges and sweeps through the world. In the 20th century we had three.
Twice - in 1957 and 1968 - we got off pretty lightly, with around a million deaths worldwide. But the other, in 1918, killed 50 million, far more than died in the First World War. All seem to have originated in birds before passing to people.
The bird flu strain now spreading through the world is much more like the first one of the last century than its two relatively mild successors. Indeed Professor Robert Webster of St Jude's Medical Research Hospital in Memphis, the world's leading expert on the disease, believes it will be "much worse" than the 1918 pandemic.
It has two particularly nasty characteristics. First, it has an appallingly high mortality rate. Half of the 120 or so people known to have caught it so far have died, 10 times the death rate in 1918. This is likely to fall somewhat as the virus spreads - if only to keep enough people alive to pass it on - but would still be devastating.
Second, as in 1918, it targets fit teenagers and young adults, rather than the old and infirm who make up most normal flu victims. It kills by provoking the immune system to overreact, so those with the most robust immune systems are in the greatest peril.
David Nabarro, the newly appointed UN co-ordinator for bird flu, says it could kill 150 million people worldwide. The Government publicly estimates that 50,000 Britons will die, but is privately preparing for 750,000 deaths.
Even that is optimistic compared with the total of up to two million deaths predicted by Sir Hugh Pennington, president of the Society for General Microbiology in The Independent on Sunday in March. That would be more catastrophic than any plague since the Black Death.