Vietnam may slaughter poultry in its big cities to prevent the bird flu virus adding to the toll of 13 people it has killed in recent weeks and move bird rearing out of populated centres, a senior official said on Thursday.

“The killing of all poultry may be conducted in large urban centres, but we can not afford to abandon poultry farming altogether,” Bui Quang Anh, director of the Agriculture’s Ministry’s Animal Health Department, told Reuters Television.

“Once the outbreak has receded, we will allow farms to hatch eggs again, but poultry farming will be tightly controlled,” Anh said after Ho Chi Minh City ordered the slaughter of all poultry.

Vietnam’s largest city, home to 10 million people near the Mekong Delta where the latest outbreak of the deadly H5N1 began, was the first to order such a complete slaughter.

It had already ordered the killing of all its ducks, which can carry the disease without showing symptoms of the virus, which kills 80 percent of the humans it infects.

Healthy birds would be frozen and eaten, while sick birds would be destroyed by burning or burial, Anh said.

But poultry raising may never return to urban centres and measures to prevent another epidemic included raising birds in indoor farms safe from wild birds, Anh said.

“We need to keep poultry away from contact with wild birds, and the best way to do it is to isolate the poultry farms and concentrate poultry farming,” he said.

Migrating wildfowl, which, like domesticated ducks can carry the virus without showing symptoms, are believed to have brought it to Asia at the end of 2003.

Since then, it has killed 45 people - 32 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and one Cambodian.

TOUGH ACTIONS

Vietnam’s mass cull is the latest tough action taken in its war against a virus experts fear could mutate into a form which could pass between humans and cause a pandemic that might kill millions in a world without immunity to it.

The Agriculture Ministry has banned hatching and raising of water fowl, such as ducks and geese, until June 30. After that all breeding facilities would have to register before resuming operations, Anh said.

Provinces which detect no outbreaks within 21 days are allowed to declare themselves free of the virus, but he declined to say on Thursday when Vietnam might declare itself free of bird flu.

But Anh noted that no new human infection had been reported in the past week and all bird flu patients had been discharged.

Since Dec. 30, the H5N1 virus has infected 11 people in the south and all have died. However, only two of seven people who caught it in the north have died, the others recovering in hospital after treatment. “It is certain that the virus is containable,” Anh said, adding that Hanoi was cooperating with international organisations, including the World Bank and the United Nations, on a bird flu prevention programme that would last until 2007.

A report by Anh’s department said the H5N1 virus had surfaced in three provinces this week.

But the virus, which spread to more than half Vietnam’s 64 provinces and cities since re-emerging in December, had caused no new infections in poultry in nine of the affected provinces over the last three weeks, it said.

Next week, the U.N. food agency and the World Organization for Animal Health will hold a regional meeting in Ho Chi Minh City to discuss the emergency.