The treaty, which was approved by the FAO Conference in November 2001, came into force on June 29, 2004.

The FAO's Director-General Dr.Jacques Diouf said that "this is a legally binding treaty that will be crucial for the sustainability of agriculture. The treaty is an important contribution to the achievement of the World Food Summit's major objective of halving the number of hungry people by 2015."

The main objectives of the international treaty are the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their use, in harmony with the Convention on Biological Diversity, for sustainable agriculture and food security.

According to Clive Stannard of the Interim Secretariat for the Treaty, "this record speed and level of ratification is an indication of the huge importance that countries attach to the objectives of the Treaty to ensure that plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, which are vital for human survival, are conserved and sustainably used and that benefits are equitably andfairly distributed."

The first session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture will take place in Madrid, Spain, from June 12 to June 16. This will bethe first occasion in which the contracting parties to the treaty will meet to discuss its implementation.

Dead bar-headed gooses were first spotted by local herdsmen in a wetland in Yushu County on April 23. Veterinarians rushed to the site and found 17 dead gooses.

The samples were first sent to the provincial veterinary laboratory and later to the national bird flu laboratory for test. The test result on Wednesday confirmed it was highly contagious bird flu.

The epidemic area is 800 kilometers from the provincial capital Xining and 60 kilometers from the county town. There are neither residents nor domestic fowls in the epidemic area, which is very high and cold, the ministry said.

The area has been put under close surveillance with due disinfection measures taken.

As a precaution, cattle and sheep in nearby areas have been moved to farther pastures.

Local residents have been informed of the bird flu outbreak and told to take preventive measures.

Samah Abdel-Aziz Mohamed died at 3:45 p.m. (1245 GMT) after a heart resuscitation failed, the Egyptian health authorities said in a statement.

The woman, coming from el-Sharabiya district of Cairo, was the 13th human bird flu case since the outbreak of the deadly disease in Egypt in February.

She was admitted to a Cairo-based hospital on Monday due to fever, severe coughing and dyspnea.

The Egyptian health authorities announced her infection one day later and said that the woman had close contact with infected domestic fowls.

Out of the total 13 human cases in Egypt, five were dead and eight others recovered after being treated with anti-viral Tamiflu drug.

The latest death came four days after the Health Ministry announced that the country's last bird flu patient, an 18-year-old girl, had been discharged from a hospital after recovery.Health Ministry spokesman Abdel-Rahman Shahin has repeatedly said that bird flu in Egypt is receding.

Egypt reported its first human bird flu case on March 18 and the second on March 27, both of whom were women.

The country found the first outbreak of bird flu virus in poultry on Feb. 17. Soon afterward, the government has taken tough measures to curb the spread of the fatal disease.

The deadly H5N1 strain has killed over 100 people worldwide since its latest outbreak in southeast Asia in late 2003,according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Most victims were infected after close contact with sick birds.The virus currently can only jump from birds to humans, but scientists fear that it could mutate into a form capable of passing easily among humans and thus spark a global pandemic.

The new vaccines will be grown in labs, in batches of cells called cell cultures, Health and Human Services Secretary
Mike Leavitt said.

This new method aims to replace older, egg-based methods which require steady supplies of carefully grown eggs and months of cultivation.

The targets are both the annual seasonal flu and the H5N1 avian influenza spreading among birds. The bird flu virus does not yet easily infect people but it has killed more than 100 people and experts fear it could mutate into a form that could spread easily and quickly among people.

If it did, it would spark a pandemic and work would have to begin quickly on a vaccine to fight it.

"These funds are part of $3.3 billion proposed by the President and appropriated by Congress to HHS for fiscal year 2006 to help the nation prepare for a pandemic," HHS said in a statement.

Experts have been urging the United States for years to help companies develop more modern methods to make influenza vaccines. The current, 40-year-old technology is unwieldy and unreliable and it takes months to determine how many vaccine doses will be available in a given year.

And HHS has worried that almost all flu vaccines are made outside the United States. If there were a pandemic of influenza, and countries acted to keep vaccine supplies for their own citizens, that might mean vaccines would not be available to Americans.

Glaxo said it would use some of the money to work on a vaccine plant it bought in Pennsylvania.

"In addition to the contract work for HHS, GSK will continue to make an investment in excess of $100 million at its Marietta, Pennsylvania, facility to establish a domestic cell culture flu vaccine manufacturing site," Britain's Glaxo said in a statement.

Maryland-based MedImmune said it would expand its facilities where it makes a needle-free, nasal-spray flu vaccine.

"We plan to expand our domestic manufacturing capacity by establishing a cell-based facility in the United States that can produce at least 150 million doses within six months of notification of an influenza pandemic," said David Mott, president and chief executive officer of MedImmune.

"We also plan to initiate our first Phase 1 study against the avian H5N1 strain this coming June under a cooperative research and development agreement with the National Institutes of Health to determine if our technology can be as effective against potential pandemic A strains as it is against seasonal A strains of influenza," Mott added.

Daniel Vasella, chairman and chief executive officer of Swiss-based Novartis, said his company would build new flu vaccine facilities in the United States.

"We will be investing additional resources in highly skilled researchers to set up one of the first flu cell culture manufacturing sites in the U.S," Vasella said in a statement.

Last year, HHS awarded Sanofi Pasteur a $97 million contract for development of a cell-based vaccine.

"Everybody should be discussing it: Why isn't the richest country in the world the healthiest country in the world?" asks study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.

The study, based on government statistics in both countries, adds context to the already-known fact that the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, yet trails in rankings of life expectancy.

The United States spends about $5,200 per person on health care while England spends about half that in adjusted dollars.

Even experts familiar with the weaknesses in the U.S. health system seemed stunned by the study's conclusions.

"I knew we were less healthy, but I didn't know the magnitude of the disparities," said Gerard Anderson, an expert in chronic disease and international health at Johns Hopkins University who had no role in the research.

Just why the United States fared so miserably wasn't clear. Answers ranging from too little exercise to too little money and too much stress were offered.

Even the U.S. obesity epidemic couldn't solve the mystery. The researchers crunched numbers to create a hypothetical statistical world in which the English had American lifestyle risk factors, including being as fat as Americans. In that model, Americans were still sicker.

Smoking rates are about the same on both sides of the pond. The English have a higher rate of heavy drinking.

Only non-Hispanic whites were included in the study to eliminate the influence of racial disparities. The researchers looked only at people ages 55 through 64, and the average age of the samples was the same.

Americans reported twice the rate of diabetes compared to the English, 12.5 percent versus 6 percent. For high blood pressure, it was 42 percent for Americans versus 34 percent for the English; cancer showed up in 9.5 percent of Americans compared to 5.5 percent of the English.

The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income English.

"It's something of a mystery," said Richard Suzman of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the study.

Health experts have known the U.S. population is less healthy than that of other industrialized nations, according to several important measurements, including life expectancy. The U.S. ranks behind about two dozen other countries, according to the World Health Organization.

Some have believed the United States has lagged because it is more ethnically diverse, said Suzman, who heads the National Institute on Aging's Behavioral and Social Research Program. "Minority health in general is worse than white health," he said.

But the new study showed that when minorities are removed from the equation, and adjustments are made to control for education and income, white people in England are still healthier than white people in the United States.

"As far as I know, this is the first study showing this," said Suzman. The study, supported by grants from government agencies in both countries, was published in Wednesday's
Journal of the American Medical Association.

Other studies have measured the United States against other countries in terms of health care spending, use of medical care and availability of health care services. But this is the first to focus on prevalence of chronic conditions, said Anderson, the Johns Hopkins professor.

Differences in exercise might partly explain the gap, he suggested. One of the study's authors, Jim Smith, said the English exercise somewhat more than Americans. But physical activity differences won't fully explain the study's results, he added.

Marmot offered a different explanation for the gap: Americans' financial insecurity. Improvements in household income have eluded all but the top fifth of Americans since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the English saw their incomes improve, he said.

Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said the stress of striving for the American dream may account for Americans' lousy health.

"The opportunity to go both up and down the socioeconomic scale in America may create stress," Blendon said. Americans don't have a reliable government safety net like the English enjoy, Blendon said.

However, Britain's universal health-care system shouldn't get credit for better health, Marmot and Blendon agreed.

Both said it might explain better health for low-income citizens, but can't account for better health of Britain's more affluent residents.

Marmot cautioned against looking for explanations in the two countries' health-care systems.

"It's not just how we treat people when they get ill, but why they get ill in the first place," Marmot said.