14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts warned that the U.K. government has been too slow in formulating plans to combat an eventual pandemic caused by bird flu.
Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, said the government lacks clear plans which will ensure rapid access to vaccines and drugs. The Department of Health has dismissed the man's concerns and said it will analyze his recommendations.
The professor advises that the actual stockpile of anti-viral drugs be doubled and shows that these drugs need to be delivered within 24 hours to patients in order to stop the spread. Treating patients at home could reduce the number of infected people and, thus, of deaths to half.
"We are significantly ahead of the curve in terms of getting stockpiles in place - which is excellent, we need the stockpiles in order to be able to respond," Ferguson stated.
The government ordered 14.6 million doses of Tamiflu, the best drug so far against bird flu, which will be enough for 25% of the population. But Ferguson and his colleagues showed that an effective intervention requires about 30 million doses.
"H5N1 is not any more likely to cause a pandemic but if it did, the likelihood is that it would cause a more lethal epidemic than other bird flu strains," he asserted. This report coincides with an 18-month investigation led by the British government, which assessed the threat infectious diseases will pose over the next 2 decades.
Ferguson and his colleagues also mentioned that new technologies to spot outbreaks of disease early would dramatically cut death rates, reduce the need for mass animal killings and save billions of pounds in battling infectious diseases.