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The Government is expected to hand multimillion-pound contracts to two companies to make a vaccine against bird flu in humans.
The Department of Health is expected to announce British pharmaceutical firms Chiron and Baxter have been commissioned to come up with the vaccine to protect humans against the H5N1 strain the day after a suspected outbreak of the deadly virus was found in poultry in France.
Until now, all outbreaks have been in wild swans or ducks but this week the owner of an indoor turkey farm, in the same region where the H5N1 virus was found in wild ducks last week, alerted authorities to abnormally high death rates in his flock of more than 11,000 birds.
His entire flock has been slaughtered and other emergency containment measures to isolate the area were triggered pending confirmation of an H5N1 infection.
If test results, expected later today, confirm the outbreak, it will mark the first time the current bird flu scare has hit commercial poultry stocks.
According to Channel 4 News, once the human vaccine has been produced, 3.5million doses would be given to British health workers in the event of a pandemic.
But health minister Rosie Winterton conceded a vaccine could be of little use.
Ms Winterton told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It is certainly true that if the H5N1 virus developed into a virus that could be passed between humans, you couldn't be absolutely clear that an H5N1 vaccine would be appropriate.
"If a human pandemic does develop, we would have to look at that point at the virus and then develop a vaccine from that.
"There is no guarantee that a vaccine would be appropriate in those circumstances. But we are working very closely to make sure that if it did turn into a virus that could be transferred between humans that we would be able to work very quickly with industry to develop a vaccine."
UK is one of the best prepared countries
Ms Winterton insisted the UK was one of the best prepared countries in the world for the possibility of a pandemic.
The Government has already commissioned 14.6 million batches of the Tamiflu antiviral drug which reduces the severity of bird flu symptoms.
Health care companies have also been asked to pitch for a contract to develop 120 million vaccine doses - enough for two jabs for everyone in the UK - once the exact strain of a pandemic virus is known.
Ms Winterton added: "What there is, is evidence of the H5N1 virus, for example, in wild birds. But at the moment there is no evidence of the H5N1 virus in domestic poultry and not even in wild birds in the UK."
Concerns have been raised about vaccine manufacturer Chiron, one of two companies in line for the £33 million bird flu contract. The firm's Liverpool factory was shut down for six months in 2004 because of concerns that its flu vaccines were contaminated. The closure caused a shortage of flu jabs in the US.
Yesterday's suspected outbreak on an indoor turkey farm in south eastern France, near Lyon, was reported as Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) called on EU governments to safeguard animal welfare and protect organic producers facing a bird flu threat.
CIWF wants any poultry cull by EU governments to be carried out "swiftly, efficiently and humanely".
The organisation's chief executive Philip Lymbery said: "The spectre of avian flu poses a double threat to producers of free range and organic chicken and eggs.
"Their birds, like those incarcerated in Europe's factory farms, could be culled en masse and avian influenza might force them to move their birds indoors. This would cause financial hardship and compromise their businesses, which aim for much higher animal welfare standards."
He went on: "For these reasons, it is vital that the EU allows both free range and organic chicken and eggs to continue to be marketed as 'free range' or 'organic' if birds are ordered indoors. At the moment free range producers have been assured of a temporary derogation to permit this but organic producers have yet to receive one."
CIWF's fear is that humane slaughter standards will be abandoned as countries rush to destroy domestic poultry - something the organisation says has already happened in many countries where infected birds have been suffocated in bags, burned or buried alive.
Earlier this week France was given clearance to start a limited vaccination programme which the authorities said was necessary because the nation's commercial poultry flocks are so extensive it is not possible to take them all indoors.
Here's what readers have had to say so far.
So our government is going to wait until Bird Flu can be transmitted from human to human and there is a vaccine for it. Then they will vaccinate everybody. What a typically fiendish plan.
