The conference, organized by a Washington-based nonprofit, the International Council for the Life Sciences, will involve experts and government officials from more than 30 countries in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

The conference's principal organizer and ICLS Director Terence Taylor told United Press International the event is "designed to deal with the whole spectrum of biological risks and threats, from naturally occurring diseases, to accidental release of laboratory pathogens" such as happened in the recent British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, "all the way through to bioterrorism."

Taylor said the breadth of focus was important to maximize participation. "In that part of the world �� you're going to get people's attention a lot more effectively" by not talking solely about bio-terrorism.

And dealing with a broad scope of threats and risks was also worth doing in itself because "any point on that spectrum could cause a catastrophe," Taylor said.

"Yes it could be a terrorist attack," he said, "But it could also be an outbreak of hemorrhagic influenza," a flu virus with ebola-type symptoms that cause the organs to liquefy.

Taylor called the region a "cockpit" of biological threats, "where (such) outbreaks are least likely to be contained" because of limited resources and political tensions.

In an illustration of just that problem, Israelis were not invited to the event, which is being co-sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency.

Taylor told UPI that "we would rather the Israelis had been there," but that the issue was "very complicated."

The problem was not principally at a government level, he said. Key participants belonged to professional associations, the regional equivalents of the American Medical Association, which boycott any contacts with their Israeli counterparts.

"In the end we took the decision to maximize participation" by other attendees, said Taylor, adding the conference would showcase a regional avian flu surveillance initiative linking public health officials and medical practitioners from Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

The Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Development is funded in part by the D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative and modeled on a similar program it supports in Southeast Asia. The consortium brings officials and practitioners together at a working level to develop joint plans for dealing with outbreaks of infectious disease, like a flu pandemic resulting from the mutation of the avian influenza virus H5N1.

Outbreaks of H5N1 among poultry have occurred in Israel Jordan and the Palestinian Territories since 2003, and in the past two years there have been 38 cases of human infection in neighboring Egypt, the third highest total of any country in the world, according to World Health Organization figures.

Jordanians, Palestinians and Israelis work together "on a daily basis" in the consortium, said another of the conference organizers, ICLS's Jennifer Runyon.

Last month, Palestinian public health officials completed a two-day tabletop exercise set up by the consortium. A similar exercise was conducted in Israel in February, and one will be staged in Jordan later this year. Next year the consortium plans to stage a multinational exercise for all three neighbors.

"There are political obstacles," Runyon told UPI, but she added the work showcased at the conference will send "a hugely strong message that these obstacles can be overcome."

"It is in their interests" to work together and develop relationships of trust, she said of the countries in the region. "If there's an outbreak, you want to have confidence in your partners to be able to identify (a virus or other pathogen) accurately" without the delay and risk of shipping samples to identify it yourself.

Taylor said that the conference would allow a baseline assessment of the region's capabilities and provide an opportunity for networking. He also hopes for a standing group of experts to be formed that will carry on the conference's work, and for the establishment of a regional training center, a bricks and mortar facility where specialists could get hands-on instruction.

ICLS' philosophy, he said was based on the premise that "containment is dead" as a counter-proliferation strategy in the bio-technology field.

"We have to get out of that mindset," he said "The technology is going to disseminate no matter what we do �� The skill sets that are risk factors are enormously diverse."

Moreover, said Runyon, as the capabilities of biotechnology multiplied exponentially, "It is enormously difficult to say what it is we should be concerned about."

For instance, boosting the capacity of countries in the Middle East and elsewhere to isolate, identify and respond to infectious diseases is a key plank of any strategy to get the world prepared for a possible pandemic.

But the process involved transferring some of the same skill sets that could be used in a bio-weapons program.

"We want countries to develop indigenous capabilities in biotechnology," she said, "but those are the same (capabilities) that are risk factors."

Give that it was impossible to stop the spread of the know how, Taylor said, ICLS believed that disseminating best practices; encouraging the development of national and international standards and codes of conduct; and building cross-national relationships between specialists was the best way to try and inoculate against the misuse of biotechnology, whether by states or non-state groups.

"There is an ocean of risk in which we have to learn to swim," he said.

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