THE bird flu virus is as deadly an "enemy" as the suicide bomber as it could claim the lives of many victims if it strikes in a crowded city state like Singapore.

Health care professionals have joined hands with security planners to run simulated threats at a new experimentation centre, to help them come to grips with possible outcomes should a bird flu pandemic break out here.

By varying factors such as the number of travellers coming into Singapore, how infected people come into contact with others, and the effectiveness of vaccines, a Ministry of Health study has mapped out how quickly the avian flu virus could spread.

At the heart of the Health Ministry's study are computer simulations developed by the newly-opened Risk Assessment & Horizon Scanning Experimentation Centre, which helps health care professionals have a clearer picture of how changes in one factor, say a large number of infected people on a flight, could affect outcomes downstream.

The centre in a government building was opened on Tuesday morning by Mr Peter Ho, Head of Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for National Security and Intelligence Coordination.

Run by the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA), the national authority on defence know how, the centre will help analysts from various fields analyse security-related problems.

These run the gamut from illegal arms smuggling, to suicide bombers in crowded areas, to how the sub prime-financial woes in the United States could hit the Singapore economy. Also on the horizon are the impact of global warming and health-related issues like bird flu and SARS.

Speaking at the centre's opening, Mr Ho said the facility would help analysts "collaborate and share information more extensively than ever before".

"In this increasingly complex and uncertain world, we must get used to the idea that it may often not be possible to determine the correct approach in the beginning," said Mr Ho.

"Instead, we may have to discover the correct approach through experimentation. Humans have mastered the art of dealing with the simple, and have become quite adept at managing the complicated. In the complex world, where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect, we need to probe first, and see how our probing affects the phenomenon we are observing, and then respond with further probes, so that over a series of probe-sense-and-response, we can begin to make sense of the complex relationships surrounding the phenomenon."

But even as the computer models aim to show the big picture of how various scenarios could pan out, Mr Ho said analysts and human judgement are critical ingredients in helping authorities make sense of complicated issues.

He said:"Subject matter experts and domain expertise are still critical in the use of RAHS. The human analyst and his or her judgement remain at the heart of RAHS. The RAHS Experimentation Centre can only provide the technology resources and technical expertise to advance the human analysts' ability to scan the horizon."