With bird flu in Suffolk, the Health Secretary says that the Government is preparing “very, very seriously and thoroughly” for a pandemic. So are we all now at risk from avian influenza? The clue is in the title. “Bird flu” is a devastating disease of poultry. The outbreak among turkeys is a reminder of the threat it poses in the UK today — to people’s livelihoods rather than lives.

True, the Suffolk infection is of the H5N1 strain that can infect humans. But the 164 killed in the developing world lived cheek-by-beak with diseased birds. The poor children who died of bird flu in Turkey had been playing with chicken’s heads rather than Heelys. There would be no health risk in eating those Suffolk turkeys, so long as you cooked them first.

The Government’s chief scientist has estimated the chances of contracting bird flu in the UK at 100 million to 1. Of course, a flu pandemic has been a possibility ever since the last one in 1968. Even so there are limited steps that the Government can take to stop one, since a mutant strain of bird flu that could pass easily between humans does not yet exist.

The authorities know all this and have called for calm. That would be more convincing if we had not learnt last year of government plans to dig “plague-pit style” mass graves, give medical staff armed escorts and close schools to keep the predicted death toll down to “only” 50,000 kids. If headless chicken syndrome should take hold, it will spread from the top downwards.

However, some responses to Suffolk do reveal the spread of a nasty antihuman virus. A virulent strain of self-loathing seems to be catching on the internet. Many claim the bird flu confirms the evils of industrial farming. Some take pleasure in seeing Bernard Matthews suffer, as if this was cosmic karma for his accursed Turkey Twizzlers.

Others suggest that a bird flu pandemic would be nature’s way of telling us there are too many people on the planet. One outraged BBC online reader asks why we cull infected birds but not humans who might infect animals? Presumably if we had taught the poor turkeys to read, those health advice leaflets might not have been wasted.

The most rational response has come from those most at risk: the unsentimental Matthews workers and other locals, who depend on killing turkeys for a living and are more concerned about the impact on jobs than health. One barman at a local pub said: “We were thinking of running up to the police in a turkey costume just to liven things up a bit. People round here are not the kind to overreact.” Bootiful.

For the rest of us to get our twizzlers in a tizz about a bird flu pandemic would be like, well, turkeys voting for Christmas.

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