FIRST THE GOOD news for Good Friday. It is safe to enjoy your Easter roast chicken. Indeed it would be safe to eat roast swan, were it not still illegal to poach the Queen’s birds.

Even if bird flu does spread in Britain, you could not catch it from eating infected chicken — unless you like your white meat red raw. The chances of anybody here falling ill from bird flu will be, according to the Government’s Chief Scientist, 100 million to one. And there is no sign anywhere in the world of the feared pandemic-causing strain of H5N1 that could pass easily between humans.

Now, before we count our chickens, for the bad news. The virulent new strain of official bird flu phobia is here to stay. Bird flu phobia is separate from avian flu itself and pays no heed to the science of virology. It infects the body politic, spread by what I once heard a top new Labour adviser boastfully describe as the Government’s policy of “organised paranoia”.

The scientific watch for a possible bird flu outbreak centres on the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in the little town of New Haw, Surrey, where I grew up. I worked there one summer as a casual farmhand. “The Research”, as locals called the lab, was a fortress of cool-headed clinical inquiry. The only headless chickens in evidence were the 200 we casuals were told to slaughter with our bare hands one afternoon.

The epicentre of the outbreak of official bird flu phobia lies elsewhere, in government offices pursuing the policy of organised paranoia, a phrase coined by that Downing Street adviser at the time of the 2003 Sars scare. The idea is that the Government will pre-empt future panics over risks to public health by planning for all manner of worst-case “what if?” scenarios. In practice, however, precautionary doom-mongering often has the opposite effect.

So it has proved with official bird flu phobia. The calming messages from sensible spokesmen have been undermined by sensational revelations about the Government’s plans for a devastating human pandemic, from armed police escorts for medical staff to “plague pit”-style mass graves. Meanwhile, the only criticism from opposition parties seems to be that Whitehall is still not doing enough to prepare for the “what if?” apocalypse.

No sooner had Sir David “Don’t Panic!” King, the Government Chief Scientist, reassured us at the weekend about the “very low” chance of a human outbreak, than a letter from Sir Liam “We’re Doomed” Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, revealed plans to close all schools if and when that outbreak occurs, supposedly to limit the predicted death toll to 50,000 rather than 100,000 children. Just the thing to jolly up the holidays.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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