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school closures may be necessary in areas affected by bird flu to prevent the deaths of 50,000 children from the disease, the chief medical officer has said.
the closure of all schools in an infected region could cut the possible death toll of 100,000 school-age children by half, according to sir liam donaldson.
he has recommended that just one case of the human form of the bird flu virus in a county should mean every school in that area is closed.
he recommends that they should stay shut for a minimum of three weeks - although other experts claim it should be nearer eight to 10 weeks.
a dead swan discovered in the scottish village of cellardyke last week was britain's first case of h5n1 bird flu. since then, no further cases have been confirmed.
scientists advise that h5n1 bird flu is extremely difficult for humans to catch.
but there is a growing fear that this form of the disease - or even another type of bird flu - could mutate into a highly contagious virus which could spread rapidly between humans.
sir liam is one of a number of virus experts who claim it is a question of "when, not if" such a pandemic occurs.
he has been involved in drawing up contingency plans for a flu pandemic, and made the school closure recommendation in a letter to schools minister jacqui smith.
he writes: "until the virus emerges, we cannot know for certain which groups would be most vulnerable.
"if all age groups were affected equally and the virus was particularly severe (that is, at the upper end of our assumptions), the excess deaths in school-age children could be as high as 100,000.
"this would mean that potentially 50,000 deaths might be prevented by school closures.
"a policy of school closures could reduce the number of deaths in children. for this reason i recommend that schools should be planning on the basis that they may have to close for part or all of the pandemic."
under the plans all children under the age of two would be forced to stay indoors, boarding schools would send children home and residential special schools would confine children to smaller units.
sir liam's advice was yesterday backed up by shadow health secretary andrew lansley, who said: "the balance of the argument points towards closing schools."
it has also been revealed that off-duty firemen and retired lorry drivers may be called into action if a bird flu pandemic hits britain.
leaked cabinet documents reveal fears that long-distance lorry drivers will not want to travel to infected areas if a pandemic hits the country.
if so, firemen and retired drivers may pressed into service to ensure essential food and drink reaches stricken areas.
the documents also reveal that in the event of a serious outbreak overseas, preventative medicine would be given to embassy and consular staff - but not british holidaymakers or expatriates.
commenting on the contingency plans yesterday, the government's top scientific adviser sir david king said there was only a "low possibility" that pandemic bird flu would hit britain.
since the cellardyke discovery, further tests are being carried out on birds picked up from 22 locations in the area near to where the infected swan was discovered. a further eight are also being investigated.
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4/10/2006- by Lucias
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physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible.
light normally bounces off an object's surface making it visible to the human eye. but john pendry and colleagues at imperial college london, uk, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.
metamaterials are exotic composites made of electronic components such as wires and inductors that can be engineered to precisely control the way light travels through them.
pendry's team has drawn up plans for a spherical metamaterial structure that would render an enclosed object invisible. "the theory tells us the material properties we need at each point," says team member david smith, from duke university in north carolina, us. "the challenge is to match those theoretical requirements in the actual material, point-by-point."
bad visibility
other designs for invisibility cloaks have been drawn up in the past. one idea is to calculate exactly how an object scatters light and design a surrounding material to exactly cancel this out.
but such cloaking devices could not be used for more than one object. "using our method you can hide different objects under the same cloak, or move around within the cloak, and remain hidden," says pendry.
however, pendry's team’s design could currently only work at wavelengths larger than visible light. designing a cloaking device for visible wavelengths could be tricky as it would involve creating nanoscale metamaterials. "at these levels it is far more difficult to control the metal's properties," says smith. nonetheless, he believes that optical cloaking devices could be become a reality within the next decade.
fun idea
will stewart, an independent optics expert at the university of southampton, uk, is less convinced. he believes that it may prove too difficult to overcome these problems within such a timeframe. "it's great fun and a lovely idea, but i don't think it can literally be taken and applied to make an optical cloak," he says.
but stewart says the approach could work well with a narrow band of wavelengths and could, for example, shield an object from radar. pendry's team is, in fact, working on just such a device made from millimetre-sized metal units, which they hope to complete within a year.
"it looks like star trek was right," stewart says, referring to the invisibility shield famously used by klingon spaceships in the science fiction show.
journal reference: science (doi: 10.1126/science.1125907)
new scientist
