UK reviewing Tamiflu stockpile

Britain is reviewing the size of its stockpile of antiviral drugs after detecting the first case of H5N1 bird flu in farmed poultry at the weekend, the Department of Health said yesterday.

To date, the country has bought 14.6 million courses of Tamiflu from Swiss drugmaker Roche - enough to treat the 25 per cent of the population which the government currently anticipates could be affected in a flu pandemic.

"This stockpile is now complete," a spokeswoman said. "We continue to work closely with the scientific and international community and base our plans on the best information available. We therefore keep the size of stockpiles under review."

Bird flu swept through Europe last winter, prompting many countries to build up drug stockpiles. But the continent has seen far fewer cases this winter. Other than Britain, Hungary is the only other country to record an outbreak at a farm this year.

Roche - which reports full-year financial results today - has predicted that sales of Tamiflu to governments last year will total between 1.6 billion and 1.7 billion Swiss francs ($1.28 billion to $1.36 billion).