Government advisers are revising upwards the estimated death toll should avian flu strike Ireland. New figures yet to be released will exceed the 3,600 deaths originally expected if the bird flu begins to infect humans.
The expert group set up by the Government to plan a response to a pandemic has changed its calculations for the amount of illness and death likely to be caused by a human outbreak, according to the director of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, Dr Darina O'Flanagan.
She was speaking in Dublin yesterday at a day-long conference entitled Ethical Dilemmas in a Pandemic, organised by the Irish Council for Bioethics.
"A revised version will be circulated shortly," she stated. The plan was under review with new research and experiences abroad.
She outlined assumptions made about morbidity and death. The plan originally assumed about 25 per cent of the population would become ill with flu - and, of these, 3,600 would die.
The rate of illness is being revised upwards, with expert groups abroad assuming a 35 per cent rate of illness, she stated. This could push deaths to more than 5,000.
A Canadian expert, speaking on that country's experience with the Sars virus, told The Irish Times that even this higher figure could be an underestimate. The University of Toronto's Dr Ross Upshur said it depended on how many extra infections each person with bird flu caused.
The Irish figures were based on assumptions that each person would infect on average another 1.8 people. Many other countries based their numbers on 2.5 extra infections, he stated. This figure would increase death estimates to more than 10,000.
Dr O'Flanagan acknowledged planners could only estimate the risk. "It is like an earthquake, we don't know when it is going to come or how bad it is going to be."
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