FAMILIES may have to wait for four months to bury their dead in the event of an avian flu pandemic, stirring up folk memories of the burial pits of the great plague of 1665, writes David Cracknell.
A confidential Home Office report says as many as 320,000 people could die from the H5N1 strain of the virus if it mutates into a form that can readily be passed between humans.
It says the emergency services may have to enforce mass burial. “Common [mass] burial stirs up images of the burial pits used in the great plague of 1665 — where in London 70,000 people died,” it adds.
The report, Managing Excess Deaths in an Influenza Pandemic, dated March 22, says vaccines against bird flu should not be seen as a “silver bullet” solution and “will not be available in the first wave of a pandemic [possibly longer]”.
The document will guide local authorities on how to cope with a pandemic. Some scientists, however, now question whether the threat is as severe as first feared. Studies have found H5N1 may struggle to become established in humans because it is inefficient at infecting cells high up in the human airway. This means it may be hard to be passed on by breathing or coughing.
The Home Office report says local authorities have the capacity to cope with 48,000 deaths in England and Wales in a pandemic lasting 15 weeks. But it warns: “Even with ramping local management capacity by 100%, the prudent worst case of 320,000 . . . deaths is projected to lead to a delay of some 17 weeks from death to burial or cremation.”
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