(Guardian U.K.) Emergency services plan for 750,000 deaths in flu pandemic

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=624058

 

 

Emergency services plan for 750,000 deaths in flu pandemic

By Geoffrey Lean and Severin Carrell

 

27 March 2005

 

Mortuaries and emergency services are to be put on alert and told to

prepare for up to three-quarters of a million deaths from a bird flu

pandemic, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

 

Emergency planners have begun to look for sites for special

mortuaries, each capable of storing 1,000 bodies, and the Home Office

is to hold an exercise this summer to practise coping with mass

fatalities. The instruction, to go out from the Civil Contingencies

Secretariat, the Cabinet Office body in charge of emergencies,

explodes the Government's public position that the pandemic could be

expected to kill only " around 50,000 " people in Britain.

 

It shows that its true expectation is closer to the prediction made by

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General

Microbiology, in The Independent on Sunday two weeks ago that up to

two million Britons could perish. The Secretariat also believes that a

quarter of the country's workforce could fall ill, paralysing economic

life.

 

A senior government official told a private seminar in London last

week: " It may be somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths and

it may be 25 per cent of the population off work. That is the shape of

the event we are going to have to deal with. "

 

He added that plans had been drawn up to confirm that emergency

services and coroners had the staff and equipment to cope with such a

crisis. Senior emergency planners said last week that they received

official instructions at the end of last year to prepare for mass

mortuaries to cope with a flu pandemic or a biological terrorism attack.

 

They said that most police authority areas normally had emergency

mortuaries to hold 100 to 200 bodies, but they had now been asked to

make provision for up to 1,000.

 

The authorities were now identifying greenfield sites and beginning to

enter into contracts with firms to provide marquees and buildings to

put on them. The planners said that these would be cooled to about the

same temperature as household refrigerators, to store bodies.

 

The scale of the preparation suggests that the Government fears that

the 14.6 million doses of anti-viral drugs it has ordered may not

arrive before a pandemic. Even in a year's time, less than half of the

order will have been met. The drugs have been delayed partly because

ministers waited for months before making the order.

 

Last November an official flu exercise involving health bodies,

emergency services and government - Exercise Icarus - identified the

lack of anti-viral drugs as a key concern. The order was placed this

month.

 

Dr John Simpson, of the Health Protection Agency's emergency response

division, said the Government was planning more exercises, including

preventing public gatherings, to stop the disease spreading.

 

Senior officials at the World Health Organisation (WHO) told the IoS

that they predict the flu virus could circle the globe within two months.

 

 

 

 

 

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.