# 1465
Who knew?
What's even more telling is - you could run this headline in just about any country in the world - and it would be every bit as valid.
For the record, the article below appears in The Scotsman.
Public don't trust politicians over bird flu says expert
By Marc Horne
THE public would put themselves at risk because they would not trust politicians to tell the truth if the country was hit by a major outbreak of bird flu, a world expert on disaster management has claimed.
Professor David Alexander, of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, has been appointed as an adviser to both Nato and the UK Government on the issue of pandemic flu.
Alexander says the country should be preparing itself for a serious outbreak of the potentially devastating virus, but feels that warnings from politicians would not be heeded because of the corrosive impact of bogus claims over Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Instead he says people would be far more likely to pay attention to experts who are independent of the political process.
The director of the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research, who led the psychiatric team which responded to the Piper Alpha disaster, said there was a real need to prepare for the worst.
"According to the biological scientists a pandemic is likely to strike us. There is no point pretending it won't happen because all the evidence suggests that it will.
"We need to be preparing right now. The future has arrived."
(Cont.)
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