EVERY country, including Britain, should appoint a Cabinet-level minister within the next two months to co-ordinate their response to avian flu, the United Nations’ most senior bird flu expert said yesterday.

David Nabarro, the UN system senior co-ordinator for avian influenza, said that a senior minister needed to be given the responsibility to ensure “joined up government”.

In an interview with The Times, Dr Nabarro, 56, said that this needed to be done by December, or plans for a global response to a pandemic would be in jeopardy. “I would like to see a person in each government given authority to bring all parts of government together for pandemic preparedness, and quickly,” he said.

“We need to bring in other parts of government: ministries for the interior, ministers of environment, transport, the treasury, and so on. It is a job that could be done by the prime minister or deputy prime minister. The key to combatting this threat is joined-up government. It was the same with SARS and it will be the same with regards to influenza.”

Dr Nabarro’s comments echo the Conservative Party’s demands yesterday for a single minister in Britain to be appointed to co-ordinate Britain’s avian flu contingency plans. The Departments of Agriculture, Health, Transport, Education, Environment, the Cabinet Office, and the Prime Minister’s Office each have separate roles in the Government’s plans to combat avian flu.

Speaking from Beijing, Dr Nabarro echoed the World Health Organisation’s concerns that tensions between countries and individual scientists may be hampering the search for a vaccine. “I am pleading for trust, openness and joint action within countries as well as between countries and within scientific institutions,” he said.

“It is tempting for individual groups to withhold information for economic reasons. In the end, if there is not complete sharing of information we will count the costs. If we cannot do that then that would be extremely unfortunate, and the consequences do not bear thinking about.”

In his first interview with a British newspaper, the London-born scientist, who was once a junior doctor at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, said that richer countries must be prepared to spend money helping poorer countries, or suffer the consequences. “We need to get each country at the same level of preparedness for a pandemic so they can contain and respond to the first clusters of human cases and to the impact of a much wider distribution of human pandemic influenza. This is a global problem, and reducing the risk in Britain and the US is not just a case of sorting yourselves out and getting your own supplies of Tamivir. The preparedness of the world depends not so much on who is strong, but on who is weak.”

Dr Nabarro said that it would take up to six months for governments and scientists to put contingency plans in place. “We cannot hang around too long because a pandemic could be imminent. Being slow will increase the number of people who will suffer and die.”

Dr Nabarro said that a November meeting in Geneva between the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Bank should ensure that funds are released. “The success of dealing with avian influenza and a human pandemic depends entirely on the extent to which countries, scientists and health organisations are going to be able to work together across continents and between countries.”

Dr Nabarro, who was responsible for co-ordinating the UN’s public health unit after the tsunami disaster, said that world leaders would have to make some difficult decisions over the next few months. “The prioritisation of drugs, and whether or not to ruin people’s livelihoods by dispensing with their flocks — the pressure on politicians is going to be enormous,” he said.

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