Researcher: Bush pandemic warning too late

NEW YORK, D.C., Sept. 16 (UPI) -- A New York City researcher says President George W. Bush's call to remain on the offensive against the avian flu has come too late.

"If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, and it hit the United States and the world, because it would be everywhere at once, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine," Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.

"The tipping point, the place where it becomes something of an immediate concern, is where that virus changes, we call it mutates, to something that is able to go from human to human."

To date, 57 human deaths from bird flu have been confirmed, despite the killing of millions of infected or suspected infected poultry in Southeast Asia. Scientists say every infected person represents another step closer to the tipping point of the flu mutating and becoming susceptible for human to human contact, instead of the current infection course of bird to human.

A draft report of the federal government's emergency plan obtained by ABC's "Primetime," estimated some 200,000 Americans would die within a few months of a pandemic of bird flu.