Britain's chief medical officer warned on Sunday more than 50,000 people could die if a bird flu pandemic would erupt in the country, stressing that any bird flu pandemic is unlikely to hit Britain this winter.

"If we had a pandemic, the problem would be that our existing vaccines don't work against it, we would have to develop a new vaccine, and people don't have natural immunity because it hasn't been around before," Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson told the BBC.

"So the estimate we are working to in the number of deaths is around 50,000 excess deaths from flu," he said.�� But it could be a lot higher than that as it very much depends whether this mutated strain is a mild one or a more serious one."

"That doesn't mean that the pandemic flu is creeping closer to the UK, it simply means that bird flu is occurring in other parts of the world, as it has over the last five to six years," he said, stressing that it was "less likely" that any new flu strain would come to Britain this winter.

"The significance of it isn't that there will be a pandemic of bird flu itself, the significance of it is that at some point, and we go by the lessons of history, the bird flu virus will combine with a human flu virus and then it will become easily transmissible," he said.

Bird flu and the deadly strain H5N1 has swept through southeast Asia and the most deadly form has been found in Turkey and Romania, sparking fears avian flu could spread to the UK through migrating birds.

Britain has so far stockpiled 2.5 million doses of anti-viral drugs, which Donaldson said would not cure the flu but would reduce the severity of the attack in the first 24 to 48 houses and would stop some people from dying.

Source: Xinhua