BUSINESSES have been given a stark warning that the Government will not bail them out if the feared flu pandemic hits Britain.

The Cabinet Office, which is co-ordinating contingency planning for the flu threat, said that some companies wrongly expected the Government or the Army to protect them from the worst of the potential outbreak. Bruce Mann, the head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat at the Cabinet Office, said: “There are not that many heavy goods vehicle drivers in the Army, and most of them are in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

A source close to the Cabinet Office added: “Some companies take the view that other people will bail them out, but the Government doesn’t have the capacity to do that any more, if it ever did. We are not going to take the haulage industry and stuff it with soldiers.”

The warning came as HSBC, the world’s third-largest bank, estimated that half its staff could be absent from work if the H5N1 bird flu virus mutates so as to be transmitted between human beings. All human cases of the virus so far have been caught from contact with birds, and the flu will have the potential to become a pandemic only when it can be passed from person to person.

HSBC’s estimate is double that drawn up by the World Health Organisation in draft guidelines for businesses. But the Department of Health also envisages a more pessimistic situation, and has forecast that as many as half of the Britain’s 60 million population could be infected.

But the World Health Organisation and the Government agree that 15 million is the most likely number of casualties if the virus mutates, over a period of about six months. This means that about 10 per cent of a company’s staff would be absent from work, although the figure could be higher as uninfected parents take time off work to care for sick children.

Although some companies were being complacent, many more were drawing up detailed contingency plans, the Cabinet Office said. AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of drugs such as Losec for gastrointestinal problems, expects at least 6,400 of its staff to be absent in the event of a pandemic and has set up a taskforce to combat the problem.

“We are also making sure that our principal contractors, such as IBM, have their own arrangements in place so that anything that may affect them doesn’t affect us,” a spokesman for the company said.

Many companies are publicly seeking to play down the threat and are refusing to give detailed estimates of how they might be affected.

A spokesperson for BP, Europe’s biggest oil company, said: “We are working out how to protect people, but we don’t want to generate alarm among our staff and those who rely on us for heating and lighting.”

Apart from the damage to families and businesses, a serious flu outbreak would strain Britain’s infrastructure and supplies. “It would be like August for about six months,” the Cabinet Office source said. “Supermarkets would be short of the staples, although they would be available.”

Many companies had even failed to prepare a contingency plan in the event that their boss falls victim to the virus, Mr Mann added. “Senior executives are not immune. How would the company cope if one of them falls ill?” If Britain escapes unscathed it will be the sixth consecutive year without serious levels of the disease. The flu circulating has changed relatively little from year to year and is in general well matched by vaccines.

The number of deaths in a pandemic can vary considerably. The 1918-19 outbreak was exceptionally virulent and killed more than 20 million people. In America, 2.5 per cent of the population died. The threat of a pandemic has grown after human cases of the H5N1 flu virus emerged in Turkey.

Two people in China were last night reported to have died of bird flu, raising the global toll to at least 78 people.

The virus is most prevalent in Asia, particularly in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and China, where a new outbreak was detected among quails in the southwestern city of Guiyang.

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