Viewed myself on BBC Breakfast this morning, looking alarmingly wrinkly and careworn, putting out the simple message that poultry workers should be vaccinated against seasonal flu in order to prevent the emergence of pandemic flu. On the same programme Prof John Oxford says that it is inevitably coming (allowing policy makers to infer - why spend money in trying to prevent it?), and the vet on the programme gets things a bit muddled.
But am in good cheer, because yesterday a patient tells me that they are vaccinating poultry workers in Turkey. It is up to us (we, the people) to make sure that the programme is as thorough as possible.
The irony is that an outbreak of avian flu would be quite beneficial from an ecological point of view. It will reduce the size of the human population a bit, and may crash the global economy, which means less manufacturing and transport activity, which means less CO2 outputs. However, from a human point of view, it would be better to arrive at these ends through non-disastrous means. And as a doctor, I am not looking forward to trying to cope with H5N1 pandemic flu, as it will mean a lot of very hard and indeed dangerous work.
So I continue to campaign for the WHO to implement its own policy of seeing that poultry workers should be vaccinated against seasonal flu in order to prevent the emergence of pandemic flu.
In an hour, off to London on the train for an H5N1 seminar at the London School of Tropical medicine.
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