The UK is sleepwalking into a new pandemic that could cause “immense suffering”, a damning new report has found.
The Covid-19 Inquiry’s Chair Baroness Heather Hallett was referring to the Government’s botched handling of the Covid pandemic but the timing of her 240-page report is significant.
The world is starting to wake up to the growing threat posed by avian influenza (HN51), or bird flu.
Since it was first identified in 1996, the strain has seen hundreds of millions of birds culled and caused sporadic outbreaks among poultry.
HN51 has recently started spreading in various mammals and is now widespread in dairy cattle across America.
A handful of cases have also been confirmed in dairy workers. These are thought to be the first cow-to-human transmissions of the virus.
HN51 has started spreading in mammals and is now widespread in dairy cattle across America
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These cases have been mild – patients have reported typical flu symptoms such as fever, chills – and isolated.
This is cold comfort for disease experts, who fear that the spread of HN51 among cows is a sign that it could mutate in them, potentially making it easier for the virus to spread to other animals and make the leap to humans.
Research is already suggesting H5N1 has acquired adaptions that could make it spread more easily, such as through the respiratory route. This would make it harder to control and increase the risk of human-to-human transmission.
Countries are preparing for this possibility by ramping up surveillance and stockpiling vaccines, with new ones in the pipeline.
However, how quickly governments would exhaust supplies and how effective they would be in the face of an evolving virus remains to be seen.
And with patchy surveillance and porous biosecurity on dairy farms, there’s a high probability that cases are spreading undetected.
A pandemic could therefore be in our midst and the world is on the back foot.
The latest report on the UK’s response to the Covid pandemic does not inspire much confidence.
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Countries are scaling up stockpiles of vaccines and developing new ones in a bid to contain the outbreak
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Releasing her first report on pandemic preparedness and resilience in the UK, the Covid-19 Inquiry’s Chair said: “There will likely be a next time. The expert evidence suggests it is not a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will strike but ‘when’.
“The evidence is overwhelmingly to the effect that another pandemic – potentially one that is even more transmissible and lethal – is likely to occur in the near to medium future.
“That means that the UK will again face a pandemic that, unless we are better prepared, will bring with it immense suffering and huge financial cost and the most vulnerable in society will suffer the most.”
If it takes the form of avian influenza, history suggests it will be devastating.
The World Health Organization recorded 463 deaths among 888 cases of bird flu between January 2003 and March 2024, putting the case fatality rate at 52 percent.
In contrast, Covid-19 had a mortality rate of 0.6 percent