Health ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized countries and Mexico on Friday in Rome signed an agreement on reinforcing cooperation against the threat of bird flu and to keep it from spreading to human beings.

The ministers, as well as representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union (EU) health commissioners also agreed to boost the capacity of producing pandemic flu vaccines.

The agreement called for coordination between national preventive plans and recognizes the need to build greater stockpiles of vaccines and anti-flu medicines.

They also decided to set up a store of three million doses of anti-flu vaccines to be used at the sign of any outbreak of the human variation of avian flu in the eight countries.

Besides, a website for global health security will be created, which will release all scientific data related to the H5N1 virus and other pertinent information.

According to the agreement, the eight countries will work together to prepare for the Beijing Donor Conference in January 2006, and Germany will host a workshop in June 2006 for information sharing on comparative approaches to develop vaccines.

On a proposal from Italy, the world's richest countries have agreed to support the developing countries to help them deal with any possible pandemic.

Bird flu has ravaged poultry farms across Southeast Asia since 2003, and at least 64 people have been dead from the virus there thus far. On Friday, Vietnam reported that they found outbreaks of the deadly strain in three more provinces.

Source: Xinhua