There is a very short answer to this question and it is: yes. A pandemic is a global epidemic of a new disease and these come along at fairly regular, if unpredictable, intervals. Flu pandemics are the biggest threat and most of these are bird flus that jump to people and then become transmissible from person to person. These hit about every 20 to 30 years. “But don’t think of it as a clock,” Neil Ferguson says. “Think of tossing a coin eight times at the beginning of each year and if you get eight heads you get a pandemic. Eventually you’ll get eight heads. It’s a random event.”

The H5N1 virus has yet to become transmissible among humans and has infected only around 300 people, who have come into contact with infected birds. But it has killed two thirds of them. If it became transmissible, it could be “catastrophic”.

The flu of 1918 killed 1 per cent of the population of Britain. If that happened today there would be 600,000 deaths. In a normal year we lose 15,000 people to flu, mostly elderly. H5N1 is likely to be hanging around for decades, so a response plan is urgently needed.

Enough anti-virals have been stockpiled to treat a quarter of the population, as long as the virus doesn’t become resistant. An effective vaccine could take six months to produce. So at the Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling they are busy crunching data to provide models of pandemic outbreaks that can be fed real-time data when clusters of infections emerge, and give politicians information to help plot containment. “It’s not as accurate as weather forecasting but better than gut intuition,” Ferguson says.

Watching the computer models run is sobering. The map gradually goes almost completely red, indicating the spread of infections, and then green, signalling that everyone is either dead or immune. If you were in a bothy in a remote Highland glen for the two months of the pandemic, you might escape.

“We would give it a good try to contain it,” Ferguson says. “The odds would be against, but it’s something we should attempt. I would hope that in the UK we could reduce deaths by three quarters or better. Even if the drugs don’t work but the vaccines do, we would expect to halve the mortality. It would still be devastating if it was 150,000 deaths, but a damn sight better than 600,000.”

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