Vietnam’s bird flu outbreaks threaten to drop farmers back into the poverty they escaped only recently and the government needs to find ways to help them, a United Nation official said on Friday.

The government and the United Nations had set up a joint programme, the world’s first, to coordinate the human health and animal health sectors to fight bird flu, said Jordan Ryan, the U.N. Development Programme chief in Vietnam.

“Many farmers are now above the poverty line but natural disasters and avian influenza can drop them back to below,” he said with Asia’s human bird flu death toll at 70, about half the number of people known to have been infected.

People in Vietnam, where the latest of 42 deaths occurred in October, are tending to avoid poultry products, threatening thousands of poultry farmers with bankruptcy.

On Thursday, Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat joined a chicken feast in the southern province of Dong Nai, an event that received wide publicity on state-run media.

“Concrete action is needed to help farmers sell poultry and limit growers’ losses,” Phat was quoted as saying in a report on the government’s bird flu Web site

Phat said his ministry would promote poultry consumption and organise production lines to ensure bird flu-free products.

No poultry infections had been found in southern Vietnam in the last three weeks, Phat said.

But in the much cooler north, seven outbreaks have killed 267 ducks and chickens in four northern provinces in recent days, the Animal Health Department said. Another 7,000 birds were slaughtered in the provinces of Son La, Yen Bai, Thanh Hoa and Ninh Binh between Dec. 2-7, it said.

Fifteen of Vietnam’s 64 provinces have been hit by bird flu and, apart from Quang Tri in the central region, all the other 14 provinces are in the north.

The H5N1 virus thrives best in cooler temperatures but the Health Ministry said no human infections had been detected since mid-November.