The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday that experts had made progress in finalising plans to fight bird flu if it jumps to humans and threatens a pandemic. At three days of closed-door sessions, the experts drawn from around the world focused on logistics, surveillance and other public health measures that would be needed, it said. "A human influenza pandemic will be a big problem," said Margaret Chan, WHO assistant director-general for communicable diseases. "But by working together we can respond effectively", he added, according to Reuters. The meeting aimed to further hone the WHO's draft "pandemic containment strategy", which calls for quarantines in infected areas and the massive use of Swiss firm Roche's antiviral Tamiflu, which has been shown to be effective in fighting the H5N1 virus in humans. H5N1 has led to the deaths of millions of birds in more than 30 countries stretching from South Korea to Germany and into Nigeria. It has spread to over a dozen new countries in the past month and infected 175 people since 2003, killing 96 of them. Although it remains an avian disease, and rarely affects humans, the big fear is that it will mutate and start to be pass easily between people, a change that could trigger a pandemic in which millions might die. --More 22 22 Local Time 19 22 GMT
