Imperial plans for H5N1

Imperial College London has confirmed that it will host a £6 million Medical Research Council centre aimed at ensuring that the world is prepared for outbreaks of infectious disease - the first of its kind in the world.

The MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, jointly funded by Imperial and the MRC, will analyse new outbreaks of existing diseases, such as polio, and those infections that may pose a serious threat in the future, such as H5N1 avian flu.

In the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease, the centre will provide countries with information about how the epidemic is evolving, how quickly it is likely to spread, how infectious and lethal it is and howit might be stopped from spreading.