As the UN secretary general Kofi Annan urged governments to work together to develop contingency plans to combat the avian flu, the World Bank said Asian economies could lose up to $200 billion each quarter if there was a global influenza pandemic.
And the Asian Development Bank said such an outbreak would push the world economy into recession and a year-long outbreak would cost Asian economies as much as $283 billion, reducing the region's gross domestic product by 6. 5 percentage points, hitting Hong Kong and Singapore hardest.
The World Bank, issuing a separate twice-yearly report on east Asia's economies, said the spread of avian flu was so far confined to the rural areas of several Asian countries, but was a big risk to growth in 2006 due to potential policy actions such as quarantines and travel restrictions.
"While the costs of dealing with this have so far been limited to around 0.1 per cent of GDP, from culling birds and implementation of better animal health surveillance systems, the potential impact of a serious pandemic is of grave concern," said Milan Brahmbhatt, an economist who compiled the report.
It said the most immediate economic impacts of a pandemic might arise - as was the case with the deadly Sars outbreak of 2003 - not from death or sickness, but from people and governments responding in an unco-ordinated way.
While the bank said that it was foolhardy to try to estimate costs from such a shock, it noted disruptions from Sars resulted in the loss of possibly 2 per cent of east Asian GDP in one quarter.
Speaking in New York, Kofi Annan said should the bird flu take on a form that could spread from human to human, millions could quickly become infected and millions die, devastating societies, overburdening health systems, disrupting transportation and trade and threatening economic and social progress.
"I myself come from Ghana, a country where families and their farmyard animals, children and chickens, often co-exist in one happy community," he told the Time Global Health Summit in New York.
"Hard as it will be, we must find ways of structuring that coexistence or we will never be able to stop viruses migrating from animals to us - and to our children," he said.
The UN chief urged world leaders to quickly set out global priorities to deal with a threatened pandemic.
"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," he warned.
Among those priorities, he said, veterinary surveillance systems needed to be strengthened around the world to better track the spread of the disease in animals.
"Governments must work together to develop contingency plans for keeping essential global services functioning and to ensure that antiviral medicines are made available to all who will need them, including the world's poorest," he said.
At home, Health Service Executive areas were instructed on Monday last by the assistant national director of population health, Dr Kevin Kelleher, to actively offer all poultry workers the flu vaccine as an urgent public health measure.
The vaccine is available from GPs who will be reimbursed by the HSE for supplying the vaccine free.
HSE regions with high concentrations of poultry workers, such as in Cavan and Monaghan, have been instructed to consider establishing local clinics in high-density poultry areas.