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To: Henry Niman who wrote (28512)	3/12/2005 11:15:31 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110194

Henry, here is an article in the Independent that brings a lot more realism to the plate. .... Bird flu could kill 2 million Britons By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 13 March 2005 news.independent.co.uk Two million Britons could die in the bird flu pandemic that experts warn is both imminent and inevitable, one of the country's leading authorities has told The Independent on Sunday. Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, also criticised the the Government's "optimistic" attitude to a potentially devastating pandemic, likening it to official complacency over BSE a decade ago. In the starkest warning yet over the potentially devastating impact of the pandemic, Professor Pennington said that the number of deaths has been greatly underestimated. He expects the flu - like the 1918 pandemic which killed more people than the First World War - to cause the deaths of many people from pneumonia "which we are still not very good at treating". He said: "If the virus moves into people there will be no stopping it. It will be here before we know it." Ministers have sought to play down the potential impact of bird flu by saying that only some 50,000 people would die in Britain. But this has already been contradicted by Scotland's chief medical officer, who says it would be 10 times worse. Yesterday Vietnamese health officials revealed that a 41-year-old nurse who had cared for a bird flu victim in the country's northern Thai Binh province had contracted the disease, increasing fears that it is beginning to spread from person to person. She is the second nurse in a week to have gone down with the flu, which until now has mainly been caught from poultry. Experts have long warned that illness in health workers would be the first sign that the disease had begun to be infectious in humans, bringing a pandemic much closer. ...