Health experts have launched a new "market" aimed at predicting when a potential bird flu pandemic will hit.

The project aims to collect opinions from medical experts such as epidemiologists, veterinarians, nurses and laboratory technicians who notice an odd case, virus sample or disease pattern.

"Farmers have used futures markets for decades to make decisions about what crops to plant," Dr. Phil Polgreen, a University of Iowa assistant professor of medicine who helped create the project, said Thursday.

"We're just borrowing that concept to help people in public health and health care make decisions about the future."

The Iowa Health Prediction Market is being funded by a $245,000 grant from the non-profit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation based in New Jersey.

The market uses the non-profit Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, or ProMED, an online global reporting system run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

ProMed uses e-mail and the internet to track outbreaks of diseases such as the H5N1 strain of avian flu that has infected 275 people since 2003, and killed 167 of them.

People "betting" on the market will need to be members of ProMed, which means  only health experts will participate, but not with their own money.

They will answer a set of yes or no questions, such as whether they think a human case of H5N1 will occur in North or South America by July 1. If the yes answers sell for 10 cents, for example, then participants are voting for a 10 per cent likelihood of it happening by the given date.

Experts fear H5N1 will mutate into a form that spreads easily among people and thereby cause a pandemic.

With files from the Associated Press