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Scottish ministers were warned 16 years ago that 60,000 people could die in a flu pandemic, newly released documents have revealed. The Scottish Government was alerted in 2007.
Failures of State by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott review – how Britain became 'Plague Island' Alan Johnson © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images When I became health secretary in 2007, the chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, took me aside to explain why there was bound to be a pandemic soon. Between 1918 and 1920, the H1N1 virus that became known as Spanish flu was responsible for more deaths than the first world war. There had been a flu pandemic about 30 years before that and another, Asian flu (H2N2), would kill up to 4 million...