Virus warning: Up to 5,000 Irish people could die if there is a flu pandemic, the head of the State's Health Protection Surveillance Centre, Dr Darina O'Flanagan, said yesterday.
She said a pandemic could also result in up to 14,000 people being hospitalised and in 25 per cent of workers taking five-eight working days off.
Dr O'Flanagan, however, stressed these figures were purely estimates and nobody knew how many people would be affected because it was no't even known which strain of the influenza virus would cause the next pandemic.
She said a pandemic would certainly occur, but nobody knew when. "It's like predicting an earthquake. If you live in Los Angeles, you know an earthquake will come but you're not sure when," she said.
Prof Bill Hall, chairman of the State's influenza pandemic expert group, said he was very reluctant to get drawn into discussing how many people might be affected in a pandemic situation. "I think risk assessments are very tricky," he said.
He said that calculations made in the UK and US differed from those of the World Health Organisation. The UK said it expected 50,000 people to die if a flu pandemic occurred.
Dr O'Flanagan said that for a pandemic to occur, the strain of flu causing it must be "readily transmissible" from human to human. This was not the case with the current bout of avian flu which has caused more than 60 deaths in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.
It was likely if there was a pandemic that the illness would affect not just the health service but the police, fire, the military services as well as fuel supplies and food production and distribution, she said. "So it is important that everybody starts to plan for how they would cope."
She said that the Republic was stockpiling one million courses of antiviral drugs to cope with any possible pandemic. Already 48,000 courses of Tamiflu have been delivered.
She and Prof Hall made their comments at a media briefing in Dublin yesterday.
Gavin Maguire, head of emergency planning with the Health Service Executive, told the briefing the State's plan for a pandemic, prepared a year ago, was being updated. He said the health service would be under significant strain if there was a pandemic. There was already a shortage of isolation facilities, he said.
However, he said other issues to be faced would be finding people to deliver services when healthcare workers fell ill and developing ways to support people at home as the advice to people with symptoms would likely to be to stay at home.
Mr Maguire said some people now believed that if bird flu came to Ireland, we would automatically be in a flu pandemic situation. This was not the case. It was important to stress, he said, that even if bird flu was to come to the Republic, it would not increase the chances of a human flu pandemic here.
Dr O'Flanagan said there had been a rush to GPs for the flu vaccine as a result of publicity about bird flu and pandemics. While it was important people in certain categories got the annual flu jab, it would not protect against avian flu or a new pandemic, she said.
If avian flu came to Ireland, she said, she would expect to see only a small number of cases.
Meanwhile, a blanket ban on the importation of exotic birds into the EU is expected to be agreed today.