Vietnam, where the deadly bird flu has killed 13 people in the last month, is in “the emergency stage” of its war on the virus and donors will be asked for more help, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said on Friday.

The government had asked the FAO and the World Health Organization to coordinate the battle and they would meet donors later this month, the FAO’s Anton Rychener said as the H5N1 virus continued its relentless spread despite major efforts to halt it.

“We are in the emergency stage now,” Rychener, the FAO’s Vietnam representative, told AMN Health.

“Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat has authorised the FAO and the WHO to coordinate efforts to help fight the virus in Vietnam,” he said.

The two U.N. agencies will meet donors - Japan and the World Bank are the biggest along with Denmark, France and Britain - along with the government and the U.N. Development Programme on February 21, he said.

The needs were many, Rychener said.

The outbreak, which began in the Mekong Delta in December, is now infecting half of Vietnam’s 64 provinces despite increasingly urgent measures to halt the rapid spread of a disease that has killed 45 people - 32 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and one Cambodian.

Vietnam needs technical assistance, laboratory equipment and logistics expertise, Rycherner said, to fight a virus that experts fear could mutate into a form that would trigger a global pandemic and kill millions of people.

His comments came just a day after Vietnam said it had appealed for international help in its increasingly desperate battle against the virus, which arrived in Asia at the end of 2003, probably brought by migrating wildfowl.

NEW ORDER

The current outbreak is Vietnam’s third since then and the virus has recurred in seven of Thailand’s 76 provinces, backing up expert contentions that it is now endemic in parts of Asia and will take years - and ruthless action - to eradicate.

In its latest step, the Vietnamese government ordered a nationwide halt to the raising and hatching of all waterfowl, such as ducks and geese, which can carry the H5N1 virus without showing symptoms.

“It is an appropriate measure,” he said.

Dau Ngoc Hao, deputy head of the Agriculture Ministry’s Animal Health Department, said a timetable for the suspension would be issued soon.

The government order was issued three days after Ho Chi Minh City, home to 10 million people, set a Sunday deadline for the slaughter of its more than 200,000 ducks.

The city is next door to the Mekong Delta and has set up checkpoints to prevent farmers bringing in live birds, which might trigger more infections of a disease that has proven fatal to 80 percent of the people who catch it.

Almost all the victims of the virus have caught it directly from infected poultry, although two Thai sisters are believed to have become infected after prolonged contact with the dying daughter of one of them.

Eating properly cooked chicken, however, poses no risk, experts say.

But the longer outbreaks last and the wider they spread, the closer a human pandemic comes as the virus could mutate, probably in a pig, into a form against which humans have no immunity and sweep through the world.

The WHO fears the virus may have reappeared in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, all poor countries where surveillance systems are weak at best.