Countries Urged to Give Millions in Bird Flu Fight

Rich nations were today urged to come up with $1.5bn (£850m) to fight bird flu and prepare for a possible worldwide pandemic.

At the start of a two-day conference in China, attended by representatives of more than 100 governments, the British health minister Rosie Winterton said the UK government would offer £20m.

The EU would increase its pledge to €100m (£68.6m), up from the €80m announced on Friday, Markos Kyprianou, the European commission's health commissioner, said.

The union's 25 member states were also expected to offer a total of around €100m, he added.

Medical experts warned that the state of global health depended on the ability of countries to financially support international attempts to battle outbreaks of disease.

"We're talking about a tremendous amount of money here for an issue that is clearly of global importance. The stakes are very high," James LeDuc, a viral illness expert at the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said.

"Whether it's Sars, monkey pox or avian influenza, the capacity that we're building is going to be very important for global health." The international donors' conference in Beijing is focused on raising money to fight bird flu, which has killed at least 79 people in Asia and Turkey since 2003.

The World Bank has said that up to $1.5bn would be needed over the next three years and, as the conference opened on Tuesday, there were hopes donors could exceed that figure.

The World Health Organisation said the Swiss drug maker Roche had agreed to donate another 2m courses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu to help poor countries battling the disease.

Last year, it donated 3m courses of the drug - believed to be the most effective treatment for bird flu - to the WHO for a global stockpile to be distributed wherever a pandemic flu strain emerged.

The World Bank has said that around 45% of the donor funding would be spent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Laos - countries in which the H5N1 virus is already endemic.

Meanwhile, a high-ranking official at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation today called for more checks to be made on air passengers arriving in the EU to reduce the risk of bird flu being imported.

Samuel Jutzi, the director of the animal production and health division, said European countries should ask passengers to fill out forms declaring all agricultural or food products they were carrying.

"It would make the work of the customs officials more effective," Mr Jutzi said. "However, it is the European commission that has to consider this."

FAO officials believe trade and travellers, not migrating wild birds, currently pose the greatest risk of the H5N1 bird flu virus spreading west from Turkey.

Mr Jutzi said the proposal for extra checks had originally been made by officials at Frankfurt airport, in Germany, where checking on 37,000 passengers between September and December had led to the discovery of 9.5 tonnes of illicit food items.

He said 80 flights a day arrived in Frankfurt from countries affected by bird flu, and officials at the airport were concerned about the unusually large number of passengers expected for the football World Cup this summer.

In Turkey, the WHO confirmed that a fourth child, a 14-year-old girl, had died from bird flu and that her brother was in a stable condition in hospital in Dogubayazit, in the east of the country - the area in which all the Turkish fatalities have happened.

A 21st person, another child from Dogubayazit, had tested positive in preliminary analysis for the H5N1 virus, health officials said.

Based on the damage that severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, caused to Asia's economy after it emerged in southern China in 2002, the World Bank says a flu pandemic in humans could result in $800bn in global losses in a year.