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The Olympics will increase the already "extreme" risk of a flu pandemic spreading in the UK, a report has said. Britain has been ranked by analysts Maplecroft as second only to Singapore for the speed at which influenza could spread, because of its dense cities and status as a global travel hub. The report said the "large influx of visitors" at Games time would raise the "already significant" risk of spread. But the Health Protection Agency (HPA) disagreed, saying the risk was low. "We have done our own review and we don't believe that there is a risk," Dr Brian McCloskey from the HPA told the BBC. "We have sporting events and music festivals all around England and we had the swine flu pandemic at Glastonbury. We also looked at research from the Vancouver Games - neither produced any significant problems." Dr McCloskey said that at Glastonbury in 2009, hundreds of thousands of people were densely packed in fields together for days at a time during the outbreak of influenza strain H1N1. Whereas he said at London 2012 visitors would only be at the Olympic Park for four or five hours, so the risk was reduced.