By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

NHS Tayside is stepping into the unknown facing the public health threat from avian flu.

Nobody in the UK has been infected and while direct contact with infected birds has proved fatal for some elsewhere, there have been no cases of person-to-person spread of the virus—a potentially deadly mutation health officials dread.

While public awareness of the threat from avian flu has heightened recently, Tayside public health officials have been cranking up their activity for months, fine tuning existing emergency plans, to cope in any crisis.

They are now preparing an exercise that will test those plans and give key personnel a chance to hone their skills and work with other organisations that will respond in a crisis.

Dr Julie Cavanagh, an NHS Tayside consultant in public health medicine, recently briefed local health bosses on pandemic flu and described the threat from an outbreak that spread rapidly across the world.

Health officials are looking to history to get pointers on how to tackle mass outbreaks of flu, but it is decades since the last pandemic flu and the world is a very different place with mass air travel offering greater opportunity for a much more rapid spread.

When asked what was the likelihood of avian flu mutating to attack humans as a pandemic, Dr Cavanagh replied, “We don’t know but the current thinking is that it is too likely for us not to plan for it in a sensible, safe sort of way but we are all hoping it is a plan we won’t really need to use.”

She said that in a pandemic the emergency services would be affected with their workforce reduced due to illness. Basic utility services would also feel the impact of a reduced workforce.

Dr Cavanagh said a diminished workforce would not be just an NHS issue, but an issue for the whole population but in the “worst case scenario” of widespread infection the emergency services would be “challenged significantly.”

However, at this stage, where there have been no cases of person-to-person infection, it would appear sensible to concentrate on what can be done to avoid infection.

“We have plans in place to work in collaboration with the state veterinary service to offer advice and protection to people who need to have contact with birds that may have been infected,” said Dr Cavanagh. “A multi-agency Tayside group, which includes the local emergency services, is working on keeping our local pandemic flu emergency plans up to date with current developments.”