Swine fever: Government appoints a ‘flu tsar’

The British Government has appointed a new 'flu tsar' to deal with the threat of a pandemic. He is Ian Dalton (inset), chief executive of NHS North East. Health Secretary Alan Johnson has seconded him to the newly created post of National Director for Flu Resilience to ensure that the NHS "is in the best possible position to protect the population".

The appointment comes as school exam boards look at contingency plans to award children GCSE and A-level grades based on their coursework. Five schools and a nursery in southern England have closed in recent days because of swine flu outbreaks and there are fears that many more will have to do the same.

Yesterday a 12-year-old girl confirmed with swine flu at one of the closed schools - Alleyn's in Dulwich, south London - told the Daily Mail that she has been bullied by phone calls, texts and threatening insults via Facebook. One text message said: "You are going to die".

Phoebe Wyburd, one of several pupils infected at the independent school, became ill at the end of last week. Her father, Francis Wyburd, said: "I do feel a bit like we've got the plague. Phoebe was upset by the first couple of texts, but once we explained she wasn't going to die she was OK.

"It is cyber-bullying. She knows some of the people who have been sending the messages, but quite a few of them were anonymous."

There are now 28 confirmed cases of the Mexican strain of H1N1 in Britain, with a further 333 suspected cases being investigated.

Yesterday Dr John McConnell, editor of the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, warned that Britain's much-lauded drug stockpile might not be enough if the drug is handed out to people in contact with flu sufferers as well as to the sufferers themselves, as has been happening at affected schools.

This is because 16 times as much antiviral medicine is needed to prevent illness as it is to treat people. By this measure, he said, while Britain claims to have enough Tamiflu to treat 30m people - about half the population - it has only enough to prevent infection in 1.9m people.