UK's bird flu vacc stocks "should rise 600%"

With an outbreak of avian influenza in the UK's largest turkey farm, the government has been advised to massively increase antiviral drug stockpiling, but the British Medical Journal also reports on the potential of combination antiviral therapy as strategies for dealing with any future pandemic.

Computer modelling of a possible outbreak of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza has prompted the UK government's scientific advisers to propose a sixfold increase in the UK's antiviral drugs stockpile.

The findings are the result of work carried out by Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College, London, which shows that the impact of a possible pandemic caused by the mutation of the H5N1 avian flu virus into a virulent human-to-human transmitable disease, could be attenuated by treating those people most likely to be infected before symptoms appear.