Quite a few articles today on "Pandemics". The following are all excerpts:

GPs flu pandemic workload warning
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
The Royal College of GPs and British Medical Association guidance said surgeries should "buddy up" with neighbouring ones to share resources.
And they said UK GPs may even need to set up separate waiting rooms for flu patients and draft in retired doctors to help with death certification.
Experts have been predicting a flu pandemic is long overdue.
-snip-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7815278.stm

Patients 'will be told not to visit GP in pandemic flu outbreak'
07 Jan 2009
Up to 20 million patients will be told to call a helpline rather than see their family doctor if a flu pandemic hits, under new guidelines.
-snip-
The new guidance will be sent to all GPs across Britain.
Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GP committee, said: “We are saying to GPs that they have to think about this now. This is not like the seasonal flu. This can happen at any time. We do not know when but we do know that it will happen.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/4162406/Patients-will-be-told-not-to-visit-GP-in-pandemic-flu-outbreak.html

GPs told to isolate flu patients as fears grow of a pandemic
07.01.09
DOCTORS were today told to set up waiting rooms to separate patients with flu from those not infected.
Guidance was issued by health experts to help GPs cope with a flu crisis as they were warned the NHS would be put under "unprecedented pressure" if a pandemic broke out. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners said doctors' surgeries will be "stretched beyond current limits" and said practices must draw up emergency plans to cope with a pandemic by the end of March.
-snip-
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23613606-details/GPs+told+to+isolate+flu+patients+as+fears+grow+of+a+pandemic/article.do

New bird flu cases revive fear of human pandemic
Los Angeles Times
11:19 PM EST, January 4, 2009
The deadly H5N1 virus, bird flu, has resurfaced in poultry in Hong Kong for the first time in six years, reinforcing warnings that the threat of a human pandemic still exists.
-snip-
Yet H5N1 has continued to "at the very least smolder, and many times flare up" since the outbreaks began in 2003, said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
-snip-
Scientists have little experience with which to gauge how H5N1 will evolve. But, Webster said, "We still have to treat this as a potentially very, very dangerous virus."
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsflu05-nws,0,727799.story?track=rss

How to Keep Your Family Safe From Bird Flu
January 07, 2009
U.S. News & World Report
With the news that a 19-year-old woman died of bird flu in China, it's time to think of how best to be safe, even if this latest case of the virus doesn't spark the long-feared global pandemic.
"We shouldn't be complacent," says Kathy Neuzil, an infectious-disease expert who specializes in flu through her work with the PATH global initiative and as a member of the pandemic flu task force for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
-snip-
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-parenting/2009/01/07/how-to-keep-your-family-safe-from-bird-flu.html