France's Institut Pasteur says that in a step prompted by the SARS outbreak, it is opening a laboratory in Shanghai to study new diseases that spread from animals to humans.

The research center is to be set up jointly with the official Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Paris-based Institut Pasteur said in a statement seen Friday on its Web site.

The announcement comes amid an outbreak of bird flu that has spread through China and nine other Asian countries and jumped to humans, killing 10 people.

Health officials warn that failure to bring the outbreak under control could trigger a global pandemic that could kill millions of people.

Research into the links between animal and human diseases took on greater urgency after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome last year. 

"The problem of SARS led us to accelerate our cooperation with the Institut Pasteur, which was the first research organization in Europe to have sent a group of experts into China to help us fight the disease," Chen Zhu, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.

The Institut Pasteur is a leading researcher in bacteriology, vaccination and hygiene. Set up in 1887, it is named for Louis Pasteur, inventor of the pasteurization process for sterilizing milk.

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