Britain reviewing size of its Tamiflu stockpile

LONDON, Feb 6 (Reuters) Britain is reviewing the size of its stockpile of antiviral drugs after detecting the first case of H5N1 bird flu in farmed poultry at the weekend, the Department of Health today said.

To date, the country has bought 14.6 million courses of Tamiflu from Swiss drugmaker Roche - enough to treat the 25 percent of the population which the government currently anticipates could be affected in a flu pandemic.

''This stockpile is now complete,'' a spokeswoman said. ''We continue to work closely with the scientific and international community and base our plans on the best information available.

We therefore keep the size of stockpiles under review.'' Bird flu swept through Europe last winter, prompting many countries to build up drug stockpiles. But the continent has seen far fewer cases this winter. Other than Britain, Hungary is the only other country to record an outbreak at a farm this year.

Roche - which reports full-year financial results tomorrow has predicted that sales of Tamiflu to governments in 2006 will total between 1.6 billion and 1.7 billion Swiss francs.

REUTERS SY PM1830