UNITED NATIONS agencies gave warning yesterday that time is running out in the struggle to contain the deadly bird flu virus that is sweeping across Asia as the epidemic claimed another life and spread to two new countries, including China.

Authorities in Beijing confirmed that ducks in the southern province of Guanxi province had died of the disease. The Government of neighbouring Laos reported infection among chickens in Vientiane, its capital.

Doctors in Thailand said that a six-year-old boy had died of the virus, the second death there in two days. It took the total number of such deaths in Asia to at least eight.

In a joint statement, the heads of international organisations described the spread of the virus as “a threat to human health and a disaster for agricultural production”.

They appealed for international financial and technical help before it raged out of control.

“We have a brief window of opportunity before us to eliminate that threat,” Jacques Diouf, the director-general of the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organisation, said in Rome.

In Geneva, Lee Jong Wook, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said: “This is a serious global threat to human health. We must begin this hard, costly work now.”

The virus has been reported in ten countries, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Governments in the region continued yesterday to slaughter millions of birds and took new steps to prevent the spread of the disease.

The Government of Singapore, which has reported no infections, ordered that farm batteries be shielded with mesh to prevent contact between poultry and wild migratory birds, believed to be the main carriers of the virus.

Many countries have banned chickens from outbreak areas. Yesterday Japan and Singapore extended that ban to the import of all birds from infected countries, including exotic species such as parrots and ostriches, live or dead.

Australia has increased surveillance of shipping, restricted access to poultry farms and deployed sniffer dogs and X-ray machines at airports to prevent the introduction of infected food and feathers.

In Bangkok representatives of governments, including the European Union, the United States and China, will meet international organisations today to discuss ways of beating the epidemic.

The gathering will be chaired by Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai Prime Minister, who has been criticised for hiding suspicions that the country was infected with bird flu two weeks before the first case was announced. He has been accused of putting political and economic interests before people’s lives.

Thailand’s second flu victim, from the northern province of Sukhothai, died yesterday morning after ten days in hospital. His mother was said also to have died.

Six other people, all but one children, are known to have died in Vietnam, although so far all the confirmed cases have been passed to humans from sick or dead chickens. The great fear among health officials is that the virus will mutate into a form that can be passed between people, causing a pandemic among those with no immunity.

Although Thailand and Indonesia have been accused of covering up outbreaks of the virus, the overall handling of the epidemic by countries in the region has contrasted with the Sars epidemic last year. China, which covered up Sars, appears to have acknowledged the latest infection promptly.

The WHO says that the only way to defeat the virus is to kill all poultry within three miles of an outbreak and to carefully dispose of corpses. Concern is growing in Thailand about the threat posed by abandoned carcasses on waste land, in car parks and canals.

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