PARIS - China remains woefully ill-equipped for tackling avian flu, a top scientist said, as other experts spelt out fears that hundreds of millions of people may die or fall sick if the virus triggers a global pandemic.
David Ho, an internationally-renowned US researcher, said China had received a wakeup call in 2003 after its initially tardy and secretive response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
But the new political will to strengthen China`s rickety medical infrastructure had yet to be matched on the ground, and this has left the country dangerously exposed to avian influenza, Ho said.
"There is little doubt that China will be in deep trouble if the flu pandemic were to strike in the next few years," Ho, who works at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, said in a commentary published by the British science journal Nature.
"It has a moral obligation to its own people, and to the world, to rectify the situation as soon as possible."
The problems highlighted by Ho include a "grossly underfunded" epidemiological system to spot disease outbreaks; an inefficient alert system to warn and advise hospitals, doctors, officials and the public; and decrepit healthcare infrastructure and poorly trained physicians.
Other specialists, likewise reporting in an issue of Nature dedicated to the avian flu crisis, reiterated worries that a highly contagious form of bird flu could soon emerge and sweep the globe, helped by jet travel, open borders and the lack of a vaccine.
"A human flu pandemic could cause 20 percent of the world`s population to become ill," said Ron Fouchier, Thijs Kuiken, Guus Rimmelzwaan and Albert Osterhaus of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, quoting figures from a 2004 study.
"Within a few months, close to 30 million people would need to be hospitalised, a quarter of whom would die. Although these figures are speculative, they are among the more optimistic predictions of how the next flu pandemic might unfold."
The team called for a "global task force" to oversee action against a flu pandemic, by helping to pool knowledge about the virus and coordinating strategies to combat it.
The entity would cost less than 1.5 million dollars a year, just a fraction of the cost of a pandemic to the the world economy, they suggested.
Avian flu is the term for a disease that affects poultry and wild fowl.
In 1997, the death of six people in Hong Kong showed that the so-called H5N1 strain of this virus could also spread from birds to humans.
H5N1 resurfaced in 2003 in an outbreak on chicken farms in the Netherlands and in Southeast Asia and China.
It has so far caused 54 deaths in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia and one death in Europe.
H5N1, while potentially lethal for humans, is not very contagious in its present genetic form.
The big worry is that it could swap genes with a conventional human flu virus, evolving into a pathogen that is both a killer and highly infectious, easily spread by coughs and sneezes.
A World Health Organisation (WHO) study, made public last Wednesday, said that the patterns in which the virus had been spreading in Vietnam raised the possibility that it was becoming better at human-to-human transmission.
The tone of the papers published in Nature was grim, saying that time was fast running out to devise and stockpile a vaccine and manufacture and distribute antiviral drugs that ease flu symptoms.