Members of Canada's religious communities will be called on to provide care in the case of an influenza pandemic and need to know how to protect themselves and others, public health experts say.

Spiritual leaders, scientists and government officials met in Winnipeg Thursday, where they tried to figure out how to mobilize Canada's faith communities safely in the event of an influenza pandemic.

Religious communities will have an important role to play, said Lt.-Col. Irene Strickland, an officer with the Salvation Army who helped lead Scarborough Hospital through an outbreak of SARS in Toronto four years ago.

"We expect that there'll be many people at home that are ill," Strickland said. Volunteers will be needed to deliver food and isolation equipment and to run errands, if people are isolated or quarantined.

Strickland recalled she and her staff struggled with fear, isolation and the workload as more patients and staff at the hospital were infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome when no one knew anything about the disease.

The idea of untrained volunteers going house to house visiting the sick is a public health nightmare and preparation is required to avoid it, said Dr. Tracey Parnell, an emergency doctor and a consultant to the B.C. Ministry of Health.

"It's preparing now so that it's not just a bunch of volunteers that are doing it on their own without knowing what they're doing," said Parnell. "We equip them with the knowledge to be able to protect themselves and to protect the people they're serving, as well."

For conference organizer Glen Klassen, the importance of pandemic flu preparedness hit home in a small, rural Mennonite cemetery in Hochfeld, near Steinbach in southern Manitoba, where he found a stone erected for 20 child victims of the 1918 pandemic.

"The faith communities have been coming in a bit late, but now there's more consciousness that the faith community has to follow suit because of its resources, and because of its special concerns for people in distress," said Klassen, who is a biology professor at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.

Klassen said he does not want to ring the doomsday bell, but he wants people of all faiths to be prepared for he called an "extraordinary microbiology emergency."

Ethical questions, such as whether front-line volunteers would get access to the medicine being stockpiled to protect doctors and nurses treating the sick and dying, are also being debated at the conference, said another conference organizer, Terry Duguid, head of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases in Winnipeg.