The biggest international meeting on the bird flu crisis opens on Monday to likely calls for extra money and fresh efforts to bolster defences against the H5N1 virus, starting with the poultry flocks where the deadly foe holes up.
The three-day meeting in Geneva is the first gathering of the World Bank and of the three agencies coordinating the global response to avian influenza -- the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).
National representatives, especially from the flu-stricken countries of Asia, will also be attending, eager to contribute to the widening pool of knowledge about the scare.
"The Geneva summit will be a make-or-break time for the human threat of H5N1 influenza," the British medical weekly The Lancet warned ahead of the meeting.
"International public-health authorities will need to finalise and fine-tune preparedness plans, find ways to support countries and regions whose infrastructure requires bolstering, and work harder to communicate their risk assessment and intentions to the public without starting a mass panic."
H5N1 is an influenza virus that at present is confined to migrating birds and poultry.
It is a threat to humans who come into close proximity to infected birds, notably by breathing virus-laden nasal secretions or dried, pulverised faeces.
More than 60 people have died of the virus in Asia since 2003, roughly half of the known cases of human infections.
So far, though, there are no confirmed cases (although there have been several suspected cases) by which this lethal pathogen has spread from human to human.
Experts fear it could acquire these contagious genes by mixing with a conventional human flu virus, emerging as a virus against which no one would today would have immunity.
Spread at jet speed by modern travel, it could kill tens of millions of people, and inflict nearly 300 billion dollars in economic costs, according to tentative estimates.
"Once human-to-human transmission has been established, we would have only a matter of weeks to lock down the spread before it spins out of control," UN chief Kofi Annan said grimly on Thursday.
"A threat like a flu pandemic cannot be addressed by one organisation, one group of countries, one sector or one profession," Annan said. "It presents us with an extraordinary collective challenge and it calls for an extraordinary collective effort."
In the past six months, the shadow of bird flu has lengthened and darkened, spreading from Asia into Siberia and into the southeastern corner of Europe, and threatening Africa, the continent that experts say is least able to protect itself because of its slender resources.
The Geneva meeting will be a stock-taking of international and national measures, both to combat the virus at its source among birds and to strengthen preparations for any human pandemic.
Priority will be given on how to beef up fundamental measures in animal health, sources say.
These include better surveillance of flocks, the early reporting of infections to national and international authorities, the culling of diseased and at-risk birds and compensation to affected farmers in order to encourage transparency.
"We... have to address the animal issue first, because that's the most serious threat," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson told AFP in Geneva. "If we're going to reduce the threat to humans, it has to be controlled in animals."
As for human health, key goals include building a stockpile of antiviral drugs, especially the coveted Roche molecule Tamiflu, designed to reduce flu symptoms, and encouraging countries to draw up plans for dealing with any pandemic.
The Geneva talks are not a pledging conference, but money needs will feature high and one spotlight will be on the World Bank to loosen its purse strings for poorer countries that lack the personnel, equipment and drugs to make preparations.
The FAO and OIE have previously estimated short-term needs for improving poultry surveillance and other veterinary measures at 150 million dollars.
Only 30 million dollars has been committed so far, sources at those agencies say.
In Geneva, the short-term needs are likely to be raised to around 170 or 175 million dollars, given the risk that the northern hemisphere winter poses to Africa, which hosts millions of migrating birds, especially in the Rift Valley.
In the medium term, "our estimation of the needs could be revised upwards, to a range of 200-250 million dollars," Samuel Jutzi, director of the FAO's Animal Production and Health Division, said.