Brussels, 19/10/2005 (Agence Europe) - In the run up to the health ministers' meeting to be held on Thursday evening to the north of London, the European Commission has presented a new batch of measures aimed at ensuring a good state of preparedness within the European Union in the event of an outbreak of a flu pandemic. Measures include: (1) the organisation of an exercise in response to the various crisis scenarios on the model used for civil protection exercises. This large scale exercise organised by the British agency will solely concern centres of decision-making and will not deploy emergency personnel. Another exercise will be to verify the security of communications; (2) an indepth examination of Member States' preparedness plans during a conference that will bring together experts from the Commission, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the WHO, on 24 and 26 October in Copenhagen.
The Director of the ECDC, Zsuzsanna Jakab, for her part, set out the guidelines on bird flu to the press on Wednesday. She above all pointed out that there is no immediate and/or automatic link between bird flu, which is a zoonosis, and the human flu pandemic which could take several years to develop. It is possible that the H5N1 virus that currently infects poultry farms to the south-east of Europe will help to form a new human flu virus, but the source of this virus can just as easily be the forms of influenza that currently infect horses or dogs in Northern America. In the immediate future, the ECDC considers that priority must be given to protecting workers who come into contact with infected fowl. Recommendations mainly include reducing the movement of persons in places where such animals are present, the wearing of protective equipment for those who come into contact with these animals, their vaccination against the seasonal human flu and an appropriate anti-viral treatment in case of infection by the H5N1 virus.
The day before the informal meeting of health ministers, the Belgian authorities suggested entrusting the most important coordination role to the European Commission, which could, for example, manage the anti-viral stocks. This proposal (which received the support of British Conservative John Bowis, MEP, who even suggests that the Commission should create its own stocks) is expected, however, to come up against the principle that public health services should be managed at national level.