Bird flu will cost as much as $800bn

At a global conference at the World Health Organisation (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, the World Bank has warned a bird flu pandemic could cost the global economy up to $800bn, which amounts to 2% of the global economy.

The Geneva conference is the first time representatives of the WHO, World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) have met to discuss the problem.

The World Bank also announced a $1bn emergency funding drive.

It is proposing to fund $500m of grants and aid to countries hit by a pandemic, and hopes to raise a similar sum through donations.

The figure was made public at the conference where a global plan for dealing with a pandemic is being discussed.

The three-day conference opened as China began a mass cull of six million poultry.

Lee Jong-wook, director-general of the World Health Organisation told the meeting of 600 health experts and planners that the world is experiencing the relentless spread of avian flu among migratory birds and domestic poultry.

The virulent H5N1 strain of avian flu, which first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, is killing birds in 15 countries of Europe and Asia, he said, and it is inevitable that an avian flu virus - most likely H5N1 - will acquire the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza.

Lee said if the world is unprepared, the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery - both directly from the loss of human life, and indirectly through its widespread impact on security, and no society will be exempt, no economy would be left unscathed.

Although Lee also stressed that a human flu pandemic has yet to begin anywhere in the world, he said the signs are clear that is coming.

Milan Brahmbhatt, World Bank chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region said that it can be assumed that the shock during a flu epidemic could be even larger and last longer than SARS which caused widespread global panic before being contained in 2003.

However pathologists view a potential bird flu outbreak as a vastly more dangerous proposition.

At least 62 people have died of bird flu in Asia since the disease broke out in 2003 and as many as 150 million birds have been culled worldwide as fears grow of a wider outbreak.

Estimates of the number of people who would die in a new pandemic have varied widely between 2 million and 360 million, but WHO says a reasonable maximum would be 7.4 million.

The World Bank put the possible economic cost at a minimum of £450 billion.