The World Health Organisation (WHO) Monday approved a new set of comprehensive regulations on national and international response to disease outbreaks, reports Xinhua.

"This is a major step forward for international health. These new regulations recognise that diseases do not respect national boundaries. They are urgently needed to help limit the threats to public health," WHO chief Lee Jong-wook said at the annual World Health Assembly here.

The new rules cover a broader range of public health emergencies, including some emerging diseases, according to the WHO. The regulations will formally come into force two years from the date on which the assembly approved them.

Under the revised regulations, countries have much broader obligations to build national capacity for routine preventive measures as well as to detect and respond to public health emergencies of international concern.

The new rules also stipulated that the occurrence of a list of diseases such as smallpox, polio and SARS must be reported to the WHO.

"The need for new rules and operational mechanisms ... has been most clearly shown during the recent outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2004-2005," the WHO said.

The original regulations agreed in 1969 were designed to help monitor and control six serious infectious diseases - cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, relapsing fever and typhus.