The changes were suggested by the U.N. Secretary-General's High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in a report commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. If adopted the recommendations would expand the United Nations' ability to investigate and intervene when natural or terror-spawned disease strikes.

"The Security Council should be prepared to support the work of (World Health Organization) investigators or to deploy experts reporting directly to the council," the panel said in its report, "A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility."

The panel recommended the Security Council and the WHO set procedures for working together and the WHO keep the council informed of any serious or suspicious outbreaks. The same rules would apply whether illnesses were caused by terrorists or Mother Nature.

The panel also recommended the Security Council "be prepared to support international action to assist with cordon operations," if a nation could not "adequately quarantine large numbers of potential carriers." Moreover, the council should also back moves to expand international public health access to nations suffering outbreaks.

"If existing International Health Regulations do not provide adequate access for WHO investigations and response coordination," the panel wrote, the Security Council should be prepared to mandate greater compliance.

"One of the problems historically with naturally occurring infections has been states trying to cover up outbreaks, not wanting to be cooperative, b ecause of their fear of adverse economic repercussions," explained David Fidler a law professor at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington.

"The model is China and SARS," said Jeanne Guillemin, an MIT professor and bioterrorism expert. "For several weeks, the Chinese government knows they have an unusual outbreak and they say nothing. The result of that is the disease spreads and it becomes international. I think that is what they are talking about."

Guillemin added: "The impulse here, and actually it is not a bad one, is to really say to governments you can't be secret about this because -- if it is an infectious, especially contagious, disease -- what you are really doing is jeopardizing the international community. Therefore, (you say to) China for example, 'we're coming in'."

The suggestion the WHO should begin forcing its way over borders is impractical, Fidler and Guillemin agreed. The organization's s taff is too limited, they said, and such a move would undermine the organization's other work by undermining its neutrality.

"My sense is, where these worlds of security and public health meet, that tends to be more political than, at least historically, WHO work has been," Fidler said. "Giving WHO that kind of high profile investigative role, in a country that doesn't want to cooperate on those issues, may create some adverse consequences for other areas in which WHO needs the cooperation."

Guillemin, a historian who has written extensively on bioterrorism, concurred. "They have always waited to be asked," she said. "They do that because they want always to be able to come back (and) abrogating the will of a nation and saying 'we're coming in' is not politically realistic for them."

Virtually no one has the ability to enter a country without permission and investigate -- "virtually nobody," said WHO spokesman Iain Simps on. "All parts of the United Nations have to have discussions with the government," he added.

"If we don't have a visa and we don't have official permission from the government to come, they are not going to let us leave the airport anyway," Simpson told UPI's BioWar. "The idea that WHO would be some sort of super national investigator -- it can't happen the way the world works at the moment."

So far, the WHO itself has declined to seek the power to enter a country without permission. Negotiators now working on an update to the International Health Regulations -- the rules that govern the WHO -- specifically rejected changes to the organization's current approach, Fidler noted.

"All drafts that I have seen up to this point do not give WHO permission to go into a country without that country's permission," Fidler told BioWar, adding that earlier concern over language in the revised regulations had been clarified.

"The WHO's ability to conduct on the spot studies would only occur with the consent of the state in question," said Fidler, who has been monitoring the negotiations closely.

The Security Council does have the power to mandate that a U.N. member state cooperate with an investigation, however, and the panel suggested that, if the WHO does not have the wherewithal, the Security Council should acquire experts of its own to investigate outbreaks.

"There have been discussions whether the Security Council ought to have a permanent inspection body created specifically because there is nothing on the bio side," Fidler said.

Annan has not yet commented on the report, Simpson said, adding that Annan had asked the panel "to look at the whole structure of the Security Council and its ability to respond to the current world situation. I know that he is preparing a response. He will then basically say what is going to be don e as a result of this report."

The panel's recommendations will be considered next fall by U.N. bodies and at a summit meeting of heads of state. The new International Health Regulations also may have been completed by then. A second negotiating session is scheduled for the end February and, if agreement is reached, participants will vote on the IHR in May

The panel report has not been part of the IHR negotiations, Simpson pointed out.

"It is not (feeding into the discussions of changes to the International Health Regulations) except that, obviously, the people who are involved in discussing the health regulations and the governments that they work for are aware of the report and its comments about disease outbreaks," he said.

"I am not exactly sure what the politics behind (the recommendations) are, but I think there's concern on the part of some states that maybe it was the United States that was inte rested in this kind of proposal connected to bioterrorism," Fidler said.

"These are all proposals that haven't been responded to by the Secretary General or the Security Council," Simpson said. "I think that it's very clear that, when this is discussed in the Security Council, one of the first issues that will come up is about sovereignty."

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