In an era where an infection can fly around the world in under a day, they said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, tackling an outbreak swiftly and comprehensively could save potentially thousands of lives.

But an endemic reluctance by some nations to ask for help, a panicky public and a chronic lack of funding in public health infrastructure are the biggest obstacles to combatting the next epidemic when -- not if -- it emerges.

SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, was identified in early 2003 -- months after first reports of an outbreak in southern China.

"It was panic for the population, even for the scientific community at the beginning stage," said Zhu Chen, the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Failings in China's public health system meant that when SARS was reported, "nobody knew that it was a new kind of virus," he added.

The time gap allowed the disease to spread, said World Health Organisation head Lee Jong-Wook, and forced WHO officials to issue an unprecedented travel warning in March 2003.

"Quick, timely action is very important," he stressed.

Governments faced with a potentially new disease must also be honest. China belatedly disciplined officials for downplaying the scale of SARS.

"Many governments see it (disease prevention) as an internal business," Lee said. "There is a basic gut feeling that this is my problem, I will deal with it in my way.

"Now, in a globalised world, any disease is one airplane away. It is not a provincial or national issue, it's a global issue."

SARS spread around the world, killing up to 800 people in an epidemic that drew global attention and cost tens of billions of dollars to economies.

Meanwhile bird flu has killed 41 people in Vietnam and Thailand, including nine in Vietnam this year, and Thailand earlier this week adopted an emergency multi-million-dollar plan to deal with possible human-to-human transmissions.

WHO officials warn that it could mutate into a highly contagious form that could trigger the next global human flu pandemic.

Alfred Sommer, dean of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, said SARS was eventually beaten via the "old-fashioned" methods of surveillance and containment -- however unpleasant that was.

"Nobody knew how contagious that disease was. Had it been more contagious, we would not have been able to stop it as quickly as we did."

Chen said that, learning lessons from SARS, China invested some 1.2 billion dollars into improving its public health infrastructure last year.

Another lesson was the need to bolster research capabilities, notably into emerging diseases. China has opened a Pasteur Institute in Shanghai, which is run in cooperation with its parent body in Paris.

International collaboration was also extremely important, while scientists needed to work much more closely with governments.

Tara O'Toole, policy expert on bioterrorism and director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh, said more diseases were emerging as an increasingly crowded world pushed further into the ecosystem.

The last three decades had seen 30 newly emerging infectious diseases, she added, while the potential for bioterrorism -- she cited recent research which puts in sight the prospect of synthesising anthrax -- was also a big threat.

Using smallpox as an example of how the WHO would tackle any new epidemic, Lee said it had stockpiled three million smallpox vaccines and in the event of a major outbreak, would coordinate international efforts.

It was also performing simulation exercises and using the latest technology to monitor oubtreaks, to ensure they are reported properly and then controlled.

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