'Give us new powers of quarantine'

Doctors should be given the power to force people with infectious diseases into quarantine, the conference heard.

The call came amid fears that a global pandemic from the Sars or avian flu viruses would kill millions.

Delegates were told that Britain was at risk because doctors cannot quarantine someone with a deadly infectious disease under the current law, parts of which are almost 150 years old.

Dr Martin Schweiger, of the Health Protection Agency, said: "At the moment I can stop people from exchanging goldfish for secondhand clothes in a premises that also serves food but I cannot even request that someone with Sars stays in quarantine, let alone enforce it.

"Obviously we would prefer to educate and encourage people in the first instance but when that fails we need to have the law there to underpin it. The failure to have anything there puts the entire population of the UK at risk."

He said the list of conditions doctors should tell the public health team about was also out of date and did not include Sars, Legionnaire's and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.