"Confronting the possibility of a potentially devastating human bird flu pandemic, the United Nations system - from Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to the UN health and agricultural agencies - laid out a blueprint for immediate preventive and mitigating action.

At the same time, a senior UN health expert said no one can predict the risk of a possible mutation of the virus into a pandemic, nor its potential death toll, which some estimates have put in the scores of millions. "The risk is there, it's a true risk, but it can't be quantified," UN World Health Organization (WHO) official David Heymann said in New York. Declaring that merely stockpiling antiviral medicines does not constitute a strategy, Mr. Annan highlighted seven priorities to combat the threat of the H5N1 virus." [Read more]