Vietnam culls poultry as Asia fights bird flu

Vietnam slaughtered thousands of birds in its two largest cities yesterday, while other Asian nations boosted efforts to halt the spread of deadly avian flu.

China vowed to vaccinate its entire stock of 14 billion poultry against bird flu, with the government promising to help pay for the process.

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and has killed more than 60 people in the region.

The virus remains hard for people to catch, but experts fear it could mutate into a form which can be passed from person to person and trigger a pandemic in which millions could die.

Britain said it believed an outbreak of H5N1 in a quarantine centre last month was introduced by birds imported from Taiwan. It had previously blamed it on a parrot from South America, a region which has no reported cases of H5N1.

Officials in Vietnam were racing against time to meet yesterday's government's deadline ofor ending poultry raising in the capital Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, the country's commercial hub and largest urban centre.

Police, veterinarians and health workers, wearing masks and protective clothes, gathered at duck farms in Hoang Mai district on the edge of Hanoi where outbreaks were detected earlier.

"We are carrying out the city's decision to kill all the poultry inside the city," veterinary official Phi Thanh Hai said as 3,500 ducks quacked in bags after being rounded up at a pond next to the Red River.

Hanoi poultry farmers said they got compensation of 15,000 dong ($0.95) for each destroyed duck, which cost 40,000 dong to raise. Forty-two people have died from bird flu in Vietnam.

Indonesia and Vietnam should be given more resources to help stamp out the spread of the virus, the head of a global animal health body said yesterday.

Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organisation for Animal Health, urged vaccination of poultry.