Would it be silly to plan a trip back to Europe for Christmas?

[HuffySpice]

We live in the Middle East.

We were planning on coming back to see family for Christmas and New Year this year.

We would need to visit a couple of places in France, and various places up and down the UK.

I'm not so worried about the exposure to Swine flu (none of us are immuno-compromised), but if the country is in Swine Flu lock-down, we could end up spending a fortune on tickets and coming all that way only to not manage to see people.

Is a restriction on movement likely? Like Foot & Mouth?

Is it likely to be a problem flitting from France to UK and back again?

Most of the people we are going to see have children, so the chances are that someone will have it at some point. Will that mean we won't be able to see people?

I'm afraid we don't have much info about it over here, but the low-level twittering about it on Mumsnet has suddenly made me realise our plans may be doomed.

What do you think?

Don't think anyone can really predict whether it will defintiely escalate, or be any worse than a regular seasonal flu. By then there will have been cases right across Europe so it won't be like F and M where there was a confined source and even then movement of people wasn't restricted.

If you booked at the minute and took out travel insurance I think you should be okay (so long as your insurance was comprehansive and did not stipulate swine flu as an exclusion). The country would only be in lockdown if the flu mutated to a severe one - which it could possibly do, and which I get the feeling the authorities think it will. But it would have to be a serious mutation.

If anything (and this is just my own personal view, not backed up by science), I think the UK should bear well should the flu mutate. We've had such a massive outbreak here, compared with the rest of the EU, that even though the mutated flu would be different, the amount of people with some resistance because of previous infection would curtail its spread. On the continent, I imagine it will spread like wildfire.

So ironically, you might find the UK a safe bet.