THERE’S not much good news from Henrik Kiertzner, an associate director at Arup Security Consulting. “We’re probably overdue for a pandemic,” he says. “It’s another business risk, so it’s a question of understanding what the probability and impact of any risk is.”

When it comes to avian flu, the possibility of the H5N1 virus mutating to a form that can be passed through direct human-to-human contact is a possibility the Government is taking “very seriously”, Kiertzner says. “Modern society is relatively fragile. We have ‘just-in-time’ logistics – for example, supermarkets are topped up on a very regular basis, as is fuel.”

In February this year the Government staged Operation Winter Willow, an exercise that looked at what would happen in the event of a pandemic. Factors such as how infection could spread, the incubation period, and who is most vulnerable, were all looked at. “Most of these planning assumptions will depend on the nature of the pandemic virus that emerges, but we can make assumptions based on past experience and modelling. For example, air travel [as we know it today] didn’t exist when the last flu pandemic occurred in the 1960s,” says a spokeswoman for the Department of Health.

Mathematical modelling and expert analysis are also deployed and each NHS trust has a plan in place that looks at how it would respond, which takes into account increased staff absences. For the public, information would be disseminated through a single automated flu telephone helpline, NHS Direct and a new government news centre. Sound comforting? Not quite, says Dr Roger Edwards, a senior consultant at PA Consulting. “The fundamental problem is that we all know that there are risks out there, and we know we have to plan for risks. But we have a hard time investing time to do that planning.” But it seems we’re on the right track. An evaluation of Winter Willow will be published shortly and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has run a similar exercise, called Exercise Hawthorn.

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