---

Avian Flu

My Lords, the Minister has covered well how the Government are doing all they can for domestic birds. During the SARS outbreak, as chairman of the astronomy and space environment group, I invited Dr Chandra Wickramasinghe—an astrobiologist from Cardiff University—to give us his views about how that outbreak occurred. Through studies of the 1918 flu epidemic he was entirely convinced, as was his colleague the late Sir Fred Hoyle, that the infective agent responsible for the outbreak of a lethal brand of influenza in 1918–19 fell directly from the skies. Can the Minister confirm whether the avian flu is the same H5N1 virus as it was in 1918? The Minister has said a lot about domestic efforts, and that we are doing everything we can, but with the wild birds it is virtually impossible. Has enough research and development been done in this area? Will the committee for science and technology, or the Minister himself, contact Dr Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology to hear, first-hand, what other methods we should be looking at to protect ourselves from a possible pandemic?