Health experts urged Asian countries on Thursday to intensify the war on a deadly bird flu showing no signs of receding and threatening to evolve into a Sars-like epidemic.
The World Health Organisation said authorities were rushing to declare the disease ravaging their poultry flocks under control and said people were still at risk from the H5N1 virus that has claimed 22 lives in Asia.
"We are in an emergency, urgency mode," Bjorn Melgaard, the WHO representative in Thailand, told regional health experts gathered in Bangkok to compare notes on fighting the virus.
"The bird epidemic is unfolding and continuing to spread at an unprecedented rate."
He reminded them that a year ago they faced an even deadlier epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that killed more than 800 people before it was finally brought under control.
"We are again confronting yet another emerging disease with the potential of causing a global epidemic," Melgaard said, adding that countries must not relax their surveillance and detection efforts.
Thailand and Vietnam, where all the human cases have been reported, have talked about declaring victory over the virulent H5N1 virus in a matter of weeks.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said it would be at least a year, perhaps never, before the virus was under control. And health experts say the risk of a human pandemic grows the longer the virus lingers.
This month there were fears, quashed quickly by the FAO, that the virus had infected pigs in Vietnam and that could speed up the mutation process.
BIRD FLU SPREADS IN CHINA: China confirmed three outbreaks among poultry in three provinces on Thursday, but so far no human cases of the virus that has killed 15 Vietnamese and seven Thais.
In Vietnam, a 16-month-old baby girl was confirmed with H5N1 on Thursday, a day after a three-year-old boy died in the country's latest death from the disease.
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