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Ask the average person in the United Kingdom what is the one thing that poses the greatest threat to this country and you would probably not be surprised if they said terrorism. After all, it is a threat that is real, as we have seen in the July 7^th bombings in London. Anyone is able to visit the MI5 website and look at the terrorist threat level in this country. At present it is listed as ‘severe’.

The official list of threats and risks which face this country has, however, until now been kept confidential. On Friday the information was released. It was not shown as a numeric list, however, but as a graph with two lines. One shows the ‘relative impact’ of each threat and the other shows the ‘relative likelihood’. In terms of immediate likely occurrence, terrorism is highest on the graph in terms of likelihood. In terms of potential impact, however, it is flu pandemic which tops the graph.

In a previous article published on The Online Clinic blog we reported the findings of a government committee regarding the potential flu pandemic that stated that it was not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. The report said that the number of deaths from the pandemic would be between 50,000 and 750,000 in this country alone and that more than one million people would require hospital care.

It is not possible to predict exactly when the pandemic might occur but experts say that when it does it will come in several waves of between three and six months over the course of two years. The Ministry of Defence has said that the flu pandemic will generate “unprecedented levels of public fear, stress and panic.”

3.3 million doses of vaccine for the H5N1 strain of avian flu have been purchased for the NHS, but it will be impossible to create a vaccine for the pandemic until it actually hits. The virus will need to be identified and a vaccine will then take between four to six months to manufacture, by which point there will have already been a massive loss of life. So although terrorism might have a higher media profile than the predicted pandemic, its effects will be in no way as far reaching as a human flu pandemic.