A year ago it seemed that you could not switch on a television set without seeing a report suggesting that the world was about to be hit by a bird flu pandemic. Gradually the coverage of this issue seems to have faded with climate change again coming to the fore as the main global concern for the human race. Only this week Channel 4 has been hauled over the coals by OFCOM for its documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle in which they misrepresented various facts and scientific opinions to debunk the ‘theory’ of Global Warming. One might think then the threat of a pandemic had passed, as little mention has been made of it for a number of months, this, however, is far from the truth.
The House of Lords Intergovernmental Organisations Committee has warned that it is only a matter of time before the pandemic strikes. In a report published this week, the committee describes the pandemic as ‘inevitable’ and says that its effect will be ‘devastating’, killing up to 75,000 people in this country alone.
The committee believes that the most likely cause of this global disaster will be a strain of bird flu. In the report it suggests that the pandemic could claim the lives of up to 50 million people across the globe.
The committee also stated that Britain is wholly unprepared for such an eventuality and criticised the country’s disease control systems as ‘poorly coordinated’ and run by groups that are too similar to each other. The committee poured scorn on the ability of the World Health Organisation, describing it as ‘dysfunctional’ and lacking the ‘organisation and resources’ to deal with a major outbreak.
The British Government has taken the committee at their word, agreeing that a pandemic is inevitable, even though the world has not seen one since 1968. The report raises concerns that flu pandemic caused by the H5N1 strain of bird flu could be devastating as the prevention methods for bird flu were less comprehensive than those which are used to deal with human illnesses.
The committee predicts in the report that human-to-human transmission will occur in ‘the near future.’ The chairman of the committee, Lord Soley said: ‘The last 100 years have seen great advances in public health and disease control throughout the world but globalization and changes in lifestyles are giving rise to new infections and providing opportunities for them to spread rapidly throughout the world.‘We were particularly concerned about the link with animal health. Three quarters of new human infectious diseases start in animals. We urgently need better surveillance systems to deal with this problem.’