United Nations officials said at a joint press conference Monday afternoon said that the current prevalent bird flu in Asia would continue to spread in the near future and urged the governments around the region to keep highly committed to the issue.

"Bird flu remains a serious public and animal health threat and continues to spread," Head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Regional Office for Asia and Pacific, He Changchui said at a press conference jointly held by the FAO and WTO in Bangkok to update the epidemic situation in the region.

He Changchui noted that the report of new infection cases in Thailand, China and Vietnam showed that the disease "is far from being under control."

The FAO urged countries concerned to continue their eradication campaigns, applying internationally recommended emergency measures such as mass cullings, quarantine and disease monitoring.

Recognizing the governments' efforts to curb further spread of the fowl disease, WHO representative and mission head, Bjorn Melgaard called on continued and enhanced measures to tackle the problem, which include the elimination of suspected animals, organized transport of animal carcass, hygienic protection and information sharing among countries.

"This is not only a national or regional problem, but an international one," the WHO official told reporters.

However, he dismissed the public concern of the transmission of the virus between humans, saying that at present the organization is lack of enough evidence to prove the transmission between humans.

WHO on Sunday issued a statement, saying that human-to-human infection of the virus causing the avian influenza might have killed two sisters in Vietnam.

The Human to human transmission "is very limited because the virus seems not to be an efficient virus in terms of moving from human to another human," said Bjorn. WHO issued the statement to keep the public informed and alerted of the epidemic situation, he added.

According to the statistics released by the FAO, more than 450 million birds have been culled in Asia excluding China, about some 0.7 percent of the region's total inventory.

(Xinhua News Agency February 2, 2004)