THE Government will buy two million doses of a bird flu vaccine as a first line of defence against a possible pandemic.

The doses would be stockpiled and used to protect key medical and emergency workers if avian flu threatened to spread from person to person.

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said yesterday that manufacturers will be invited to tender for a contract to supply the H5N1 vaccine. Nobody knows if H5N1 — which has killed more than 50 people in Asia in the past two years — will become a pandemic, but the World Health Organisation has warned governments that it is a possibility. If so, the vaccine would need to be tailored to match the precise strain that developed the ability to spread through human populations.

It was confirmed yesterday that bird flu had claimed its first Indonesian victims. Tests showed that Iwan Siswara Rafei, 38, and his one-year-old and nine-year-old daughters had died of the disease within days of one another this month.

Siti Fadillah Supari, the Indonesian Health Minister, said that it was not known how they had been infected but that an investigation was being conducted. The crucial question is whether the three victims caught the virus from infected birds or from another person.

Tens of millions of chickens, ducks and wildfowl have died of the disease or been culled to prevent it spreading. Most of the forty Vietnamese, twelve Thais and four Cambodians who have died lived in rural areas and are believed to have caught the virus directly from birds or their faeces.

But the family of Mr Rafei lived in Tangerang, an urban area southwest of Jakarta, the capital, a long way from the site of previous bird flu infection.

If the virus mutated to combine with a human virus, the result could be a disease that would spread unchecked. It could be transmitted along international air routes, with a death rate of 60 per cent or higher.

Yesterday, however, Ms Supari said that the virus which killed the three Indonesians had not mutated.

“The results show a conventional one and not a new virus. Therefore there is no need to worry about human to human transmission,” she said.

Three hundred people who had been in contact with the dead man and his daughters, including his wife, housemaid and another daughter, were tested but showed no signs of contagion. Anton Apriyanto, the Indonesian Agriculture Minister, has ordered poultry and pigs within two miles of any bird flu outbreak to be killed.

Other countries, including France, Canada, Australia and America, have also announced plans to buy the vaccine. Ms Hewitt said that in Britain the vaccine doses would be used to protect NHS workers. The Government announced in March that it would be buying 14.6 million courses of Tamiflu, an antiviral drug used to treat flu, over the next two financial years.

British researchers will now carry out further clinical studies on the H5N1 vaccine to learn more about how it works and how effective it could be.

Professor Peter Openshaw, the head of respiratory infections at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, London, said: “This is a very welcome development.

“If a pandemic does occur, the closure of healthcare facilities and other essential public services because of illness among staff would be a major problem.”

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