Robert Webster: 'We ignore bird flu at our peril'

Saturday, 17 September 2011 18.30 EDT

With the UN issuing renewed warnings and a Hollywood disaster movie stoking our fears, bird flu is back in the news. We meet the man who first warned of a pandemic 50 years ago – and who is worried again now

In Steven Soderbergh's new bio-thriller, Contagion, the audience is kept guessing about the killer's identity until the final frame. Is it the mu shu pork that Gwyneth Paltrow consumed in a Kowloon diner or is it, as Laurence Fishburne, playing the deputy director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests, all the fault of the birds? "Someone doesn't have to weaponise the bird flu," he intones at one point. "The birds are doing that."
In the end, Soderbergh appears to have it both ways, suggesting that the culprit is a combination of bird flu and nipah, a bat-borne virus prevalent on Malaysian pig farms. In real life, however, there is little doubt about where the true threat lies.
"I haven't seen the film yet but bird flu is the real killer lurking in the shadows," says Robert Webster, the world's pre-eminent expert on bird flu, when I catch up with him en route from Oxford to Malta where he has back-to-back influenza conferences. "Nature has already shown us that there is a virus out there that kills 50% of the people it infects. We ignore it at our peril."
It is a warning that Webster, a virologist known as the "pope of bird flu", has been sounding for more than 50 years, initially to the scepticism of his peers but to growing respect more recently. The virus that keeps Webster awake at night is H5N1....    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/17/bird-flu-swine-flu-warning#