A DOCTOR at the forefront of treating the east Asian bird flu outbreaks has said fears of a world pandemic may be exaggerated. “It may never happen,” said Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of Oxford University’s clinical research unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Farrar believes there may be weaknesses inherent in the virus which explain why it has not killed more people and has not been passed from human to human in the two years since the first outbreak.

Farrar’s views contrast with those of the UK government, which has warned of disaster. Last month Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said a pandemic was a “biological inevitability”.

Virologists have predicted it could infect up to 750,000 people in the UK, of whom 50,000 could die. They argue that Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug, is the only treatment that might reduce the severity of the symptoms.

The UK government has earmarked £200m (€297m) for 14.6m doses of Tamiflu to protect the population as far as possible from any outbreak. Now, however, Tamiflu is at the centre of a World Health Organisation safety review, following reports of deaths and liver failure among people who have taken it.

Experts also have doubts about the effectiveness of the drug. Last weekend Dr Nguyen Tuong Van, who runs the intensive care unit at the Centre for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, said: “We place no importance on using this drug.”

Vietnam has had 91 confirmed bird flu cases, with more than 40 deaths. Worldwide it has killed about 120 people.

“Why have so few people been infected, given the billions of poultry across Asia and so many people exposed to them on a daily basis?” said Farrar.

There remained a possibility, however, that the world was “sitting on a timebomb”. If flu did break out, he said, “it would spread very rapidly, especially in this era of air travel”.

A spokeswoman for Roche admitted the only evidence that Tamiflu might work against pandemic flu strains had come from laboratory cell cultures and limited animal trials. But she added: “Tamiflu is designed to be active against all clinically relevant influenza viruses.”

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