THE government is to mount an exercise to help emergency services prepare for any potential bird flu pandemic that could kill thousands of people in Britain.

The disease has already jumped species, leading to three human outbreaks, the most serious of which killed 23 out of 34 people infected in Asia last year.

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, has said that the question “is not if the pandemic comes, but when”.

The exercise in September — a table-top simulation in a bunker beneath Whitehall — will be co-ordinated by Cobra, the cabinet civil emergencies committee, and will involve the army, police, health department and other key government organisations.

The aim is to gauge how the country would cope if a mutation of the virus affecting chickens and ducks in Asia were to sweep the human population in a global pandemic.

According to the health department’s contingency plan, the healthcare system could be overwhelmed. Estimates of deaths in the first six weeks of the outbreak range from 20,000 up to 710,000, after which the disease would begin to subside. About 20m people could suffer serious breathing problems.

The young would be hit hardest because older people have some immunity left from the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. Officials are looking for sites for mass mortuaries. The global death toll could make the pandemic more serious than the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, the worst infection since mass statistics have been gathered.

In Britain the virus killed 228,000 people. Worldwide, about 50m died, more than in the first world war.

If bird flu strikes Asia, international travel would virtually cease and health checks would be carried out at every British sea and airport as the government tried to prevent the infection spreading to the UK.

The health department’s strategy calls for infected people, along with anyone with whom they have come into contact, to be quarantined, although under existing laws this could only be voluntary.

Schools would be closed, large public gatherings banned and travel around the country restricted to essential journeys only.

Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, announced last month that the government intended to buy up to 3m doses of a vaccine that protects against H5N1, the flu strain currently killing chickens and ducks in Asia.

In the event of an outbreak these doses will be given to health staff, key workers needed to keep the country running, and then people most at risk from infection.

However, if a bird flu pandemic strikes, the virus is likely to be an as yet unknown mutation of H5N1, meaning existing vaccines would offer only partial protection.

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