How do flu viruses spread so rapidly across the globe?

Chris - Okay, Les. Very good question and very topical too because
we’re expecting flu to arrive in the UK at any moment. There are lots
and people out there scrutinising what's coming in to testing
laboratories all over the country to start logging the arrival of the
virus and then tracking where it goes. And the fact is that flu is an
infection of humans and that to infect someone, you have to come
into contact with a virus that a person has made.

We know where flu comes from. It comes originally from birds and
specifically aquatic birds. They infect humans but also other animals
like pigs and periodically, humans infect a pig with a strain of human
flu, a bird infects a pig with a strain of bird flu, the pig mixes the two
together and you produce a new strain, a pandemic strain, that
comes back out of the pig, and it goes back into the people.

Actually, how it spreads though is again down to either birds or

humans. Now birds can fly and that means that even though people
can't necessarily walk across the ground surface more than a certain
speed, birds can carry infections very, very quickly because they can
fly very quickly. So certainly, some of the pandemics that we’ve seen
in the past probably were accelerated or assisted in their spread by
animal movements.

But nowadays, this has been really brought down to be a minor

contribution because the dynamics of human populations are
absolutely huge.

In the year 2000, the House of Commons working party, a

government working group assembled to look at air travel, estimated
that at any moment in time, there was about 500,000 people
airborne around the Earth at any moment.

And the reality now is that where historically, if you'd wanted to go

from say, Sydney, Australia to London, then it would’ve taken you
months to do that journey. And if you were incubating something in
Sydney when you left, by the time you got to London, you would
either be dead or better. Now because of air travel, you can be on
the other side of the world in less than the time it takes you to
develop symptoms of an infectious disease which means you can
leave, be fully infectious, and infecting people en route, and you
won't even know you're ill yet. And so, as a result, these pandemics
are being accelerated or the risk of their transmission is being
accelerated by modern air travel and we saw this with SARS in a very
big way.

We don't think that flu comes from space. There are some people
who do think that but we don't think that that's true. We have pretty
good idea as to how it spreads, but we certainly have to keep our eye
on modern transport because it’s a big worry. Because if we aren’t
very vigilant and we don't watch what people have and where they go
with it, and what animals have and where they go with it, then as the
population increases, we’re going to see more and more risks in this
kind of thing happening. You just have to look at what happened
with SARS in 2003. That got thousands and thousands of people,
8,000 people in a very short time. At a time when the world was
gearing up for weapons of mass destruction release because we
thought Saddam Hussein was going to unleash weapons of mass
destruction of an infectious nature on the world, and luckily he
didn’t. But the whole world was prime for that to happen and SARS
still ripped through all of that without too much trouble. But it’s a
really interesting question and thank you for that