“The next pandemic may cause very high morbidity and mortality in a few weeks. It could cause one billion cases and two to seven million deaths,” said Jean-Marc Olive, the organization’s country representative for the Philippines.

The estimates were derived from models based on previous flu epidemics, he told a forum organized by the Australian embassy.

Even “a modest pandemic lasting over one year might cause losses as high as three percent of Asia’s GDP (gross domestic product) and 0.5 percent of world GDP,” Olive said.

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed at least 172 people since 2003, mostly in Southeast Asia, according to the world body.

Most human infections have occurred through contact with sick birds, but scientists fear the virus could mutate and become easily spread among humans.

The organization said the evolution of the threat posed by bird flu “cannot be predicted.”

Olive said mass poultry culls could help to avert a human pandemic, and that countries should boost preventative measures, strengthen surveillance and prepare for any outbreak.

A recent exercise simulating an outbreak of bird flu in Cambodia showed that the world body could deliver a large supply of Tamiflu — a medicine used to try and treat human cases — to an affected country in two days.

But it also showed the need to streamline procedures so aid could be dispatched more speedily, he said.

Representatives of Australia and the Philippines at the forum said both countries had been spared cases of the deadly bird flu virus so far.

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