The European Union, South Africa, the United States and the United Nations underlined the urgent need for further measures to prevent the use of germ warfare amid growing concern that some countries or groups might be developing the banned weapons.

"The threat of disease as a weapon of war and terror -- the threat of biological weapons -- is not speculative, it is a threat that is a clear and present danger," South African disarmament official Peter Goosen told the review conference on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which opened here on Monday.

But there were immediate signs of disagreement on the method, as the US ruled out renewed attempts to boost the BWC and put forward a series of separate proposals to combat the use of germ warfare at national level.

The EU, South Africa and other countries maintained that there was also a need to upgrade the international treaty despite an effective US veto earlier this year.

The three-week meeting, which was scheduled long before the September 11 terrror attacks in the US, is due to examine why negotiators failed in July to agree on inspection measures to reinforce the BWC, which bans the production, use and stockpiling of biological weapons.

After six years of negotiations, the US rejected proposals for international verification of installations and companies handling biological material, saying they could have jeopardised national security and confidential "bio-defence" data.

The proposals had received the backing of more than 51 of the 144 countries that have ratified the BWC, including several US allies.

US Under Secretary of State John Bolton told the conference on Monday that recent bio-terror attacks in the US involving anthrax demonstrated the limits of the germ warfare treaty and said verification measures proposed in a protocol would have been ineffective.

"Countries that joined the BWC and then ignore their commitments and certain non-state actors would never have been hampered by the protocol," Bolton said.

Bolton broke with the conference's tradition by publicly singling out North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria for effectively violating the ban by developing a germ warfare capability. He said there were more countries on the US list which would be approached in private.

"Before we consider new ways to strengthen the BWC however, we must first confront the failure of many states to abide by that very document," Bolton said.

But Washington also called on the conference in Geneva to set up national checks to prevent the use of germ warfare, as well as a code of conduct for laboratories and scientists that handle biological material.

"Such measures, if adopted and implemented, will contribute significantly to doing what none of the measures in the draft BWC would do: control access to dangerous pathogens, deter their misuse, punish those who misuse them, and alert states to their risks," Bolton said.

The new proposals -- first unveiled by President George W. Bush on November 1 -- stopped short of explicitly calling for mandatory inspections of suspect plants around the world.

But the European Union stood by the need for some inspections.

"We are convinced that a balanced and flexible approach involving cooperation, transparency and verification measures will represent one of the key formulas in future multilateral negotiations," Belgian delegate Jean Lint told the conference on behalf of the EU.

South Africa said it also regretted the failure to adopt verification measures earlier this year.

In a written statement read to the conference, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that preventing the use of biological weapons had become more important than ever following the September 11 attacks, in which presumed Islamic extremists slammed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

"The horrific attacks of September 11 in the United States could have been far worse if weapons of mass destruction had been used," Annan said.

"The challenge for the international community is clear: to implement to the fullest extent possible, the prohibition regime offered by the Convention," Annan said.

The BWC is the only treaty on arms of mass destruction that does not contain international verification measures, unlike some nuclear treaties and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

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