Bird flu spreads fear and hoarding in Paris

France is prepared to gas any infected birds. Picture / Reuters

PARIS - "Tamiflu? You're kidding - it's gold dust," says the woman at a pharmacist in a smart Paris suburb.

"Everyone wants it, but no one can find it. I have some people who come along every day, with a prescription in their hand, to see if they can get a box.

"When I tell them we're out they ask about face masks and flu vaccines, and I have to tell them the only vaccines available are not appropriate against bird flu."

Last month, mentioning bird flu or the drug Tamiflu to the average French citizen would have been met with a shrug of Gallic indifference, and the notion of using face masks would have been laughed at.

But a few weeks is a long time when a decent health scare begins to snowball. Attitudes are abruptly changing,

Nearly two years after it was first identified in Asia in poultry flocks in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, the H5N1 avian influenza virus has now reached the southeastern corner of Europe.

Turkeys and chickens in Romania and Turkey have fallen sick with the disease after apparently being infected by migrating birds, and there are suspected cases in Bulgaria, Croatia and Greece.

The risk is that H5N1 could pick up genes from other flu viruses, making it as contagious as normal flu but many times more lethal - a pathogen against which no one today would have any immunity.

All this means that from the Atlantic to the Urals, authorities are having to walk a tightrope with their publics.

On the one hand, they have to say that the threat is deadly serious, which warrants the cost of quarantining farms and culling infected flocks; preparing apocalyptic scenarios for maintaining essential services and government in the event of a global pandemic; and stockpiling Tamiflu, a drug that in the absence of a cure or a vaccine is believed to provide the best chance of easing symptoms.

Every day, the French Government hammers away at the statistics in a bid to reassure the public.

It has allotted 600 million ($1 billion) for preparations in 2005-06. It has already squirrelled away nine million doses of Tamiflu, and another 5.6 million doses have been ordered from the Swiss maker Roche for delivery by the end of the year. If the pandemic breaks out, Tamiflu will be distributed to all who need it, for free.

Fifty million high-protection face masks have been given to hospitals, with 100 million more to be distributed by 2006. If a vaccine for a mutated virus it is engineered, France has already ordered 40 million doses from pharmaceutical companies.

But on the other hand, the Government also has to caution calm, telling the public that life should go on, emphasising that there is no sign that H5N1 has mutated into the big killer and that with common sense and good animal hygiene it never will.

This odd fan dance, with its panicky undertones, is sowing disquiet among citizens who until now have pretty much ignored Asia's problems and know little or nothing of the science.

Some are trying to get a friendly doctor to sign a prescription for Tamiflu and evidently are succeeding, if Parisian pharmacy supplies are any indicator. Others are trying to get the drug over the internet.

Chicken is beginning to slide off the menu as people mistakenly fear that eating cooked poultry could give them bird flu.

Sales of chicken have fallen by up to 40 per cent in Italy and by between 10 and 30 per cent in France, although there has been no change in Germany, Britain or Belgium.

The unreal atmosphere is summed up by a cartoon in Sunday's Le Parisien, which features a crowd of terrified people running away from a chicken, which says, bemused: "All of a sudden I understand how the fox feels when he gets into the hen house."