Geneva ? The World Health Organization moved Friday to revise alarming predictions that a pandemic stemming from the bird flu virus ravaging parts of Asia could kill as many as 150 million people.

The U.N. health agency was deluged with inquiries after Dr. David Nabarro – named Thursday as the U.N. coordinator for avian and human influenza – cited the number during a news conference at the U.N.’s New York headquarters.

While WHO’s flu spokesman at the agency’s Geneva headquarters did not say the 150 million prediction was wrong, he emphasized that 7.4 million deaths is a more realistic estimate.

Scientists have made predictions ranging from less than 2 million to 360 million. Last year, WHO’s chief for the Asia-Pacific region predicted 100 million deaths, but until now that was the highest figure publicly mentioned by a WHO official.

“We’re not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins,” WHO influenza spokesman Dick Thompson said Friday.

“You could pick almost any number” until then, he said, adding that WHO “can’t be dragged into further scaremongering.”

Experts agree there will certainly be another flu pandemic – a new human flu strain that goes global. However, it is unknown when or how bad that global epidemic will be.

Mutiara Gayatri, 6, who has been infected with bird flu, lies on a bed Friday at a hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. The World Health Organization revised a prediction from an earlier U.N. estimate of 150 million possible deaths of a flu pandemic to 7.4 million after being deluged with inquiries after releasing the initial estimate.

It also is unknown whether the H5N1 bird flu strain circulating in Asian poultry now will be the origin of the next pandemic. But experts are tracking it just in case, and governments across the world are preparing themselves for such a possibility.

Two factors will have a major influence on how many people will die from the next flu pandemic, experts say. One is the attack rate – the proportion of the population that become infected. The other is the death rate, or the proportion of the sick who die.

Normal seasonal flu viruses have an attack rate of between 5 percent and 20 percent, but a death rate of less than 1 percent. Between 250,000 and 500,00 die from flu every year, according to WHO.

Based on evidence from the three pandemics that occurred during the 20th century, scientists have determined that pandemic flu strains tend to infect between 25 percent and 35 percent of the population.

The worst death rate was seen in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. That killed 2.6 percent of those who got sick, or about 40 million people.

The other two pandemics were gentler. The 1957 one killed 2 million and the most recent, in 1968, killed 1 million.

Forecasts that change the assumed attack rate or death rate will yield different predictions. Other assumptions, such as whether anti-flu drugs will work against the virus, also would change the figures.

WHO said Friday it considers the most likely scenario to be a death toll of between 2 million and 7.4 million people.