Asian countries should intensify their war on a deadly bird flu that shows no signs of receding with fresh outbreaks in China and which threatens to evolve into a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars)-like epidemic, health experts said yesterday. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said authorities were rushing to declare the disease ravaging their poultry flocks under control and it warned people were still at risk from the H5N1 virus that has killed 22 people in Asia. "We are in an emergency, urgency mode," Bjorn Melgaard, the WHO representative in Thailand, told regional health experts gathered in Bangkok to compare notes on fighting the virus. "The bird epidemic is unfolding and continuing to spread at an unprecedented rate." China confirmed three outbreaks among poultry in three provinces yesterday, but so far no human cases of the virus that has killed 15 Vietnamese and seven Thais. In Vietnam, a 16-month-old baby girl was confirmed with H5N1 yesterday, a day after a three-year-old boy died in the country's latest death from the disease. Melgaard recalled that a year ago Asia faced an even deadlier epidemic of Sars that killed more than 800 people before it was finally brought under control. "We are again confronting yet another emerging disease with the potential of causing a global epidemic," he said, urging nations not to relax their surveillance and detection efforts. "We would expect that we will see human cases in other countries that have the bird epidemic," Melgaard said. **PHOTO CAPTION*** A chicken infected with bird flu stands in its egg-laying cage. The outbreak has been caused by an H7 influenza subtype, which is not the form of avian influenza ravaging poultry stocks in Asia. (AP /Suzanne Plunkett)