EXPERTS gathered yesterday to figure out how to halt the rapid spread of bird flu through Asia, which has killed at least eight people and threatens to develop into an epidemic more terrifying than SARS.

Their task was huge now that the virulent virus has struck in China, the birthplace of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The world?s most populous nation is home to a vast poultry industry.

So overwhelming is the job of killing tens of millions of domestic birds in hopes of removing the breeding grounds of the virus, international organisations have launched an urgent appeal for the money and expertise to fight an all-out war on it.

?This is a serious global threat to human health,? said World Health Organisation chief Lee Jong-Wook. ?We must begin this hard, costly work now.?

The great fear is that the H5N1 avian flu virus might mate with human influenza and unleash a pandemic among people with no immunity to it.

So far, there is no evidence of people-to-people transmission. Humans infected so far are believed to have caught the virus directly from birds.

But experts say no matter how remote the possibility, they fear it could happen and the WHO underlined that by launching its appeal with the Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Organisation for Animal Health.

A birdflu outbreak in China was what experts dreaded most given the speed at which the virus spreads.

An outbreak on a southern Chinese duck farm is under control, a government official said on Wednesday, as residents of the capital were urged not to panic on the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday.

Eight dead

According to USDA figures, nearly four out of five chickens in China are raised on household farms, making epidemics harder to control. The world?s most populous country, which also accounts for 46 percent of total world egg production, said it had followed all the right procedures after discovering the case on the Guangxi farm.

Thailand, accused of covering up its outbreak for weeks, said on Monday two of its 76 provinces had been hit. On Wednesday, it expanded its crisis zone to 25 provinces. ?Clearly it is of concern now that there is an outbreak here in China,? said Dr Julie Hall, a WHO coordinator in Beijing. ?It is very urgent that the matter is dealt with quickly.?

The big hope for the Bangkok meeting of experts and officials is that the international cooperation which helped douse last year?s SARS epidemic, albeit after nearly 800 deaths from China to Canada, can be reactivated swiftly.

But little appears to be available to fight the bird flu bug, unlike the fight against SARS in the similar early stage of the rampage of that disease, another one which passed from animals to humans.

There are no vaccines for it because the bird flu virus has mutated since first crossing the species barrier in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six people.

Seven of the eight dead were young children. No one knows why they are so vulnerable. No one is sure how it spreads, although wild birds are the prime suspects, or how it has hit 10 Asian countries from Japan to Pakistan in such a short time. There is simply no historical precedent for such near simultaneous outbreaks so far apart, the WHO says. The two latest countries to declare outbreaks present particularly alarming problems.

China?s huge population and humans living in close proximity to poultry and other livestock in farms across the south alarm epidemiologists, who worry they will be cauldrons for the next big flu epidemic.

Laos, an impoverished, largely agricultural nation of just five million people, has what the WHO calls a ?very poor public health infrastructure?.

?If the virus became embedded in Laos, we?ll have very serious problems,? World Health Organisation spokesman Peter Cordingley said.

The political dimension of the crisis is also acute for some countries, with small farmers who are dependent on poultry getting increasing agitated and stock markets starting to take hits as investors fear a SARS-like impact.

SARS cost Asia $60 billion last year and pummelled the airline and tourism industries, according to the Asian Development Bank.

Indonesia confessed it did not have the money to pay farmers compensation for killing their birds and so could not follow the recommended procedure of slaughtering all poultry on an infected farm and within a radius of up to five km of it.

It will use vaccines, which are cheaper. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been under fierce fire at home, accused of a major cover-up and facing a general election early next year.

He is under fire from abroad, where the European Union, the second biggest customer of a Thai chicken industry earning more than $1 billion a year from exports, said it no longer trusted his government.

Darren Schuettler