Nigel Hawkes (left), Times Health Editor, examines today's news that the Government is buying almost 15 million doses of an anti-viral drug to prepare the UK for a global flu pandemic

What are the chances of a global flu pandemic? Would it definitely hit the UK?

That's impossible to say, but most flu experts believe a pandemic is overdue, as the last was in 1968. A pandemic would affect every country in the world - there isn't a way of isolating the UK.

How would this anti-viral drug work if a pandemic hits the UK? Wouldn't a vaccine be more useful?

Tamiflu would help, by reducing the length and severity of infection, and probably the fatality rate. Nobody knows how effective it would be against a modified form of the avian flu virus, but the belief is that it would make a significant difference.

A vaccine would be preferable, but it is impossible to create a vaccine until you know the precise strain that is causing the pandemic. It then takes about four to six months to produce it. Fortunately flu is very seasonal, tending to occur here around the end of December and the first weeks of January. So if a pandemic strain appeared in the Far East, there might be time to produce a vaccine against it before it got here.

Is 15 million courses enough to protect the UK population?

The World Health Organisation advises that a quarter of the population would be likely to catch flu in the event of a pandemic. So the plan is a reaonable one.

The contingency plan talks about cancelling concerts and football matches. Is this just another health scare?

It is, of course, a health scare. But the trouble with health scares is that you never know which one is going to come true.

Flu killed 20 million people, at least, in 1918-19, so a Government that failed to make plans to deal with a repetition would be careless, to say the least. If a pandemic starts, it might be sensible to try to slow its spread by reducing the mixing of people at social events, for a limited period of a few weeks. But how effective such measures would be is a matter of conjecture.

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