At a meeting in Brussels, EU health experts examined a British proposal to delay school re-openings until the end of September, to help buy time so vaccines and other responses can be prepared.

Other ideas on the table include the possibility of stopping people with flu symptoms from boarding aircraft. Greece's announcement that it would vaccinate its entire population came as a surprise.

"Everyone's doing whatever they want," said one official at the European Commission, which was caught short by Athens's decision Friday to vaccinate up to 11 million citizens and residents.

Indeed jurisdiction over health matters rests with each of the EU's 27 member nations and "the governments are jealously protecting this right to decide what to do in any emergency," he said.

Despite this, Brussels is trying to harmonise efforts, to better respond to the A(H1N1) virus, which has killed a total of around 40 people in EU nations Belgium, Britain, France, Hungary and Spain.

Thirteen countries have already informed the commission about precautionary measures they plan to take to mitigate the impact of the disease, which first surfaced in Mexico and has killed more than 800 people around the globe.

Germany and Italy plan to vaccinate around a third of their populations.

Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou has committed to make a report on September 16 listing the priority actions to take, which the EU health ministers will use as the basis for extraordinary talks on October 12.

Work on a vaccine is well advanced, but it remains unclear whether it would be ready in sufficient quantities by the time children return to school in September, a period of risk, according to health officials.

"As children will have no residual immunity, they could be amongst the groups worst affected and can be 'super-spreaders'," said a British health ministry document listing options to limit the spread of the virus.

The move to delay the retun to school would buy time for more preventative action to be taken but it would come at a cost to business and families.

"Whilst this would disrupt education and have a significant negative effect on services and businesses, particularly those highly dependent on working parents, these disadvantages would be outweighed by the children's lives saved," the document said.

France's Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said the virus will gain ground when children go back to school, and Paris will probably raise its swine flu alert then, triggering measures including possible school closures.

Yet doctors and health experts remain divided over the threat it poses.

"Everything we're doing is just making people scared," said French urologist Bernard Debre, who is also a parliament deputy in the party of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Debre described the illness as just a "little flu".

But the head doctor at the flu unit at the Saint Luc hospital in Brussels warned: "We have to expect the unexpected."

In any event, cities and towns in Belgium are preparing for the worst.

They've been requested to prepare their cemeteries for more deaths.

"We have asked the municipalities to dig graves in advance, to avoid any problems that might be posed by frost in the winter," an official with the crisis centre in the Walloon regional government told AFP.

"We must avoid any painful, unforeseen problems for the families," he said.

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