The World Bank said yesterday a flu pandemic could cost the global economy as much as 800 billion US dollar a year as China called in international health officials to discover whether bird flu had killed a 12-year-old girl.

The World Bank set out the likely financial cost at a meeting in Geneva at which hundreds of experts are drawing up a strategy to prevent bird flu from developing into a pandemic in which millions could die.

"Normally it takes six months to design a programme of this kind. We have three days," the senior UN coordinator for avian and human influenza, David Nabarro, said at the talks, stressing the need to boost surveillance and reporting.

The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is known to have killed 63 people in four Asian countries and led to the culling of 150 million birds worldwide. It has recently spread to eastern Europe and is expected to move into the Middle East and Africa.

The World Health Organisation confirmed that China, the world's most populous nation, had asked it to probe a death which could be linked to bird flu.

China, which has yet to report any cases of bird flu in humans, has invited WHO experts to investigate three suspicious cases of pneumonia in the southern province of Hunan, the site of one of a number of recent outbreaks of flu in birds.

Beijing had previously denied any connection between the deadly H5N1 form of the bird flu virus and the pneumonia cases.

Tests on the three did not show the presence of H5N1, but the virus could not be ruled out because the three lived close to the site of an outbreak.

WHO Director-General Lee Jong-Wook told the Geneva talks that migratory birds were carrying the virus into domestic poultry flocks around the world.

He said it was only a matter of time before an avian flu virus, most likely H5N1, acquired the ability to be transmitted from human to human.

The World Bank report said a previous study on flu pandemics had suggested that any new pandemic could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 human deaths in the US alone, which it said would translate into economic losses for the country of between 100bn and 200bn.

The World Bank will launch an appeal for a 1bn package at the conference, half of it to be provided through its grants or interest-free loans and half through a trust fund financed by donors, Adams said.

Swiss drugs company Roche said it was in talks with other drugmakers and governments to step up production of its antiviral drug Tamiflu, seen as the most effective method of fighting bird flu currently available.

Roche said it had received more than 150 requests from third parties to produce Tamiflu and was in early talks with eight companies, selecting potential partners for more detailed discussions by the end of November.

Hong Kong has begun giving out free flu vaccinations to the elderly and other high-risk groups.

PHOTO CAPTION

A chicken vender takes a nap on cages at a chicken market Tuesday Nov. 8, 2005 in Shanghai, China. (AP)