Influenza Pandemic (S&T Report)

My Lords, I join others in paying tribute to our chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Broers, in bringing this inquiry and expediting it through the Select Committee. We decided to undertake this inquiry last June/July but we did not take any evidence until the beginning of October. As an economist, not a scientist, I came to it uncertain quite what to expect. In the summer I was highly alarmed by the headlines then in the newspapers of the possibility of a pandemic hitting us this winter. Like many others, I was, in my bones, well aware that we were anything but ready to cope with such a pandemic. In one sense, I found the experience of going through the inquiry reassuring. Most noble Lords who have spoken so far have referred to the difficulties they foresee in meeting a pandemic. What reassured me—and I shall come back to this later—was that the chances of our being hit by the pandemic this winter did not seem likely and there was time to plan. However, I share the view of the rest of the committee and of those who have spoken so far, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, regarding the Government’s complacency that what they have already done has been sufficient and the failure of lateral thinking. I return to why I was somewhat reassured by what we heard. We began the inquiry in earnest in October at a time when the geese were migrating from Siberia to Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and eastern Turkey. There was a lot of tabloid hype, but we learnt that we were at some point likely to see pandemic flu sweeping the world and it was likely to emerge from a mutation of avian strains of flu, as had happened in previous pandemics. The current strain of H5N1 avian flu which has been circulating in Asia since 2003 is a particularly vicious strain. But the key to its emergence as pandemic influenza in human beings is when the virus shifts from the current avian strain which has so far infected only those humans who have had very close contact with birds to a virus which can be passed from human to human. So far, that has not happened. There are only two known possible cases of human-to-human transfer, both in Vietnam, where a family member nursed another family member. While there is a particularly vicious strain of avian flu circulating in the bird population of Asia and migrating birds will spread it to other areas, it has so far stuck to birds and it has not mutated to a human form of pandemic influenza. The chances of it mutating are greater, and the greater the degree to which avian flu becomes endemic in the poultry population, especially of a country such as China, with its vast population of chickens—I gather that there are 700 million ducks in China, in most cases living cheek by jowl with other people—