The H7 strain of influenza is bad news if you are a chicken, or if you are a chicken farmer. In 2003, an outbreak of H7N7 flu in the Netherlands devastated the poultry industry, forcing the culling of 30 million birds at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros.

So far as public health is concerned, however, its danger is almost non-existent. Even the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which has killed 113 people, is exceedingly difficult for humans to catch. H7 flu is still more benign: it has caused one known human fatality in history, a Dutch vet infected during the 2003 epidemic. Ordinary people need worry only in their capacity as taxpayers, liable for the compensation bill for culls.

The headlines that accompanied the recent news of an H7 outbreak in Norfolk were thus more than a little disingenous. When it emerged that a poultry worker on

the first infected farm had contracted conjunctivitis, the only way in which the virus generally affects humans, several papers proclaimed Britain’s first case of bird flu. True, of course, in a very technical sense: the worker had caught a flu virus from a bird. But this minor eye infection had no relevance to the more dangerous H5N1 strain, or to the probability that an avian virus will trigger a human pandemic in the next couple of decades.

H7 flu is, of course, important from an animal health perspective, even though the Norfolk virus turned out to be the H7N3 strain, which is much milder than the type that struck the Netherlands. The lifting this week of the EU export ban on British beef, ten years after it was imposed to counter BSE, is a reminder of the economic impact of agricultural diseases.

Of far greater consequence for human health, though, is

a new study led by Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, who had the misfortune to publish just

as the H7 outbreak was announced. Amid misleading panic over “bird flu in Britain”, its significant implications for public policy and pandemic planning have thus not received the attention

they deserve.

Ferguson’s team has used sophisticated computer models to provide by far the most detailed simulation yet of how a flu pandemic would affect Britain, and how well different mitigation strategies would work. The findings are comforting and concerning at once: they suggest that it is possible to contain a pandemic, but only given much more intensive preparations than are in train.

A pandemic virus that infects people as readily as the 1918 Spanish flu is forecast to make 20.4 million people ill enough to need medical treatment, a third of the population. A less transmissible virus, such as the 1957 pandemic strain, would affect 16.8 million.

Both these figures could potentially be halved using antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu, provided that these were given to every member of every infected household.

This is where the problems begin. Such “household prophylaxis” requires a stockpile of about 30 million courses of antivirals, enough for half the population. Britain has so far ordered just 14.6 million, sufficient to cover one in four.

To be fair, the Government set this policy before the results of the new research were known. But given the limits of Roche’s capacity to manufacture and deliver Tamiflu, it should waste no time in ordering a much larger supply. The advantages of household prophylaxis would also resolve the real political problems that surround rationing antivirals for key workers and the sick alone, while their untreated families worry that they are next in line.

Ministers should take this opportunity to embrace it now, as the best possible preparation for an attack of bird flu that gives genuine cause for concern.

Mark Henderson is the Times science correspondent