The world is overdue for an influenza pandemic and must act swiftly if it is to prevent one being triggered by the bird flu now endemic in parts of Asia where it has killed 46 people, UN officials said yesterday. ?The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic,? Shigeru Omi, the head of the World Health Organization in Asia, said at a bird flu conference in Vietnam, the country hardest hit by the H5N1 virus. The world usually had a pandemic every 20 or 30 years, but it has been 40 since the last one, he said.

The ?versatile and very resilient? bird flu virus that swept through large parts of Asia at the end of 2003 would be the source of the next one without concerted action, he said. Joseph Domenech of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization called specifically on rich, developed countries to do more. ?If they don?t do more, sooner or later the problem could appear in their place,? he told the conference in Ho Chi Minh City, home to 10 million people and close to the Mekong Delta where Vietnam?s latest outbreaks began in December.

?The ball is on their side,? he said. The latest outbreak in Vietnam has killed 13 people. All, like earlier victims, appear to have contracted it from direct contact with sick birds. But what these experts fear is that the H5N1 virus could get into a human or animal with a human flu virus and mutate into a strain that could sweep through a world population with no immunity and kill millions. The virus, which has already turned up in cats and now in flies, would take ?many years? to eradicate and action was needed now, Domenech said.

Darren SCHUETTLER