Health experts urged Asian countries yesterday 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 Mel-gaard, 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.

?We would expect that we will see human cases in other countries that have the bird epidemic,? he said.

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.

Thailand, which found recurrences of the disease in 14 areas this month, still says it expects to do so next month.

<B>Vigilance </B>

The Thai government, with an eye on the country?s shattered $1 billion-a year poultry trade, is eager to resume exports and sent a high-level delegation to top-buyer Japan this week.

?If Japan, a country with a very high concern on health standards, agrees to re-import our chicken, it is very likely that other countries will follow,? Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak told reporters after returning from Tokyo.

In Vietnam, where 15 people have died and another human case was confirmed on Friday, Premier Phan Van Khai urged officials not to let their guard down despite his earlier orders that the disease be brought under control this month.

Khai said they ?must continue directing prevention efforts without allowing any early complacency among certain agencies, officials and residents?, the state-run Vietnam news daily reported on Friday.

Outbreaks have been reported in 57 of Vietnam?s 64 provinces and 27 million birds have either died or been destroyed. Another 30 million birds have been slaughtered in Thailand. The UN?s Food and Agriculture Organization 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.

?If you allow this virus to keep on entering the human population over and over again, you could have the virus learning to transmit effectively from human to human,? said Malik Peiris, an influenza expert at the University of Hong Kong.

?This is clearly what happened with SARS last year.?

Experts worry the virus could infect a person who also has the human flu virus, allowing it to mutate into a strain that could spread through people with no immunity.

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.

Peiris said it may be inevitable. He said Hong Kong studies on pigs imported from China had found them infected with the human influenza virus.

With pigs and chickens living side-by-side on most farms in southern China, where outbreaks of avian influenza among poultry and ducks have been reported, the threat of human and H5N1 viruses mixing in pigs to create a ?super virus? is real.

?Inevitably, pigs are going to be exposed to this virus,? Peiris told the Bangkok meeting.

Darren Schuettler