GENEVA, November 8 (RIA Novosti, Yekaterina Andrianova) - Russia will present its proposals on how to contain the spread of avian influenza as leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations meet in St. Petersburg next July, the chief Russian epidemiologist said Tuesday.

Gennady Onishchenko, who is leading the Russian delegation to the World Health Organization's three-day conference on bird flu in Geneva, said the potential pandemic of the H5N1 strain among humans would dominate the agenda of the upcoming G8 meeting.

"We are presently putting the agenda together...I will be presenting it to experts of the eight countries in Moscow tomorrow and we mail our proposals around in December," he said.

Onishchenko stressed the importance of improving the monitoring system of the disease spread and expanding the network of testing laboratories.

The current WHO conference, with 400 experts from more than 100 countries in attendance, is trying to work out a common international strategy to halt the global spread of bird flu. But, according to Onishchenko, the gathering is unlikely to come up with any breakthrough solution.

"The conference's main value is that this is the first [potential] pandemic we are [jointly] bracing ourselves for, with a comprehensive consideration of the problem starting at the outset," he said.

He said none of the experts questioned the imminence of a bird flu pandemic, but stopped short of predicting the time of the outbreak.

A vaccine against the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu will be impossible to create until after a pandemic breaks out, and the process will take at least 6 months, Onishchenko said.

"If a pandemic strain emerges, the best-case timeframe [for producing a vaccine] will be half a year."

Experts have no evidence as of yet to prove the possibility of the H5N1 strain's human-to-human transmission, but they warn that the virus will mutate with time and be able to jump species.