By Paul Eckert

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) - China's veto of any Taiwanese participation in the U.N. World Health Organization leaves a dangerous gap in the global network as it faces the threat of bird flu and other diseases, Taiwan's medical authorities said on Monday.

Taiwan has unsuccessfully sought observer status in the WHO for 10 years, but has been rejected as a result of China's insistence that only sovereign states should be allowed to take part. China claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island.

"This is a human security issue -- a human rights issue," said Wu Shuh-min, who heads a group of doctors and lawmakers touring the United States and Canada this week to seek support for Taiwan's 2007 bid to join the WHO.

"With the avian flu threatening the international community, we ought to fight those diseases together, instead of having a hole in the network," said Wu, president of the Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan.

Membership or observer status in the WHO is a rare issue on which Taiwan's often fractious democracy of 23 million people is not divided, the physician said in an interview.

Taiwan has been divided from mainland China since 1949, when Nationalist forces fled to the island and Mao Zedong's Communists took power in Beijing. China says the island is a breakaway province that must accept reunification.

Last May, the WHO rejected for the 10th consecutive year Taiwan's bid for observer status at its annual assembly.

Chinese pressure to isolate Taiwan often takes "ridiculous" forms, such as insisting that hosts add the word "China" to the names of groups from Taiwan when they appear at professional medical gatherings, said David Huang of the Academia Sinica Institute of European and American Studies.

Chinese pressure means that even when Taiwan's doctors get invited to less controversial, non-U.N. gatherings, "more often than not, we find it's too late or we cannot find a way to get into the conference room because China blocks us," he said.

Wu said his hospital in Taiwan lost two nurses among six infected with SARS when that respiratory disease hit China and its neighbors in 2003. Taiwan received no WHO help in controlling that mysterious infection, he said.

"We went through tremendous psychological trauma and the whole society was in a panic state," Wu said.

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