As the days tick down to Viet Nam's most important celebration, Tet or the Lunar New Year, the Hanoi resident said his wife doesn't know if it's safe to serve the traditional chicken dish.

"It would be the first Tet that we don't eat it," he said, as Viet Nam struggles to contain a bird flu outbreak that has seen nearly 2 million chickens culled or killed by the virus.

At least 18 people may have been infected with avian flu in Viet Nam. Twelve of those have died, with three confirmed bird flu cases. All were from the north, while the poultry epidemic has been raging in seven northern and southern provinces.

Viet Nam yesterday took its strongest measures to quell the outbreak, banning all chicken sales in southern Ho Chi Minh City, home to some 10 million people. A check of public markets in the city on Friday found no chickens, alive or dead, for sale.

Officials from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Hanoi have advised consumers to avoid contact with live poultry, and stay away from areas contaminated with poultry feces.

But the CDC added in an e-mail sent out to American citizens living in Hanoi: "Eating cooked chicken poses no known health hazard relating to avian flu."

Becoming careful

In Ho Chi Minh City, Kentucky Fried Chicken, which runs Viet Nam's only major fast-food restaurants, has said it will import frozen chickens to replace local supplies. A lone customer was seen on Friday morning at one of its busiest downtown shops.

In Hanoi, far from the bird flu outbreak, chicken has disappeared from some upscale restaurants including those run by the ritzy Metropole hotel.

Chicken is still available on the country's flagship carrier, Viet Nam Airlines, although passengers are turning wary.

On a recent Viet Nam Airlines flight from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, one businessman chose shrimp instead of chicken for lunch.

"I've stopped eating chicken because of the bird flu," the Ho Chi Minh City resident said.

Amongst Hanoi's local residents, chickens are still being sold and eaten with gusto despite the deaths from avian flu of two children and a woman in the capital city.

A man who just finished eating a bowl of Viet Nam's signature "pho" or noodles with chicken, said he was unconcerned: "Nothing to be afraid of," he said.

Apparently driven by fear of shortages, buyers were also seen snapping up live chickens at a downtown market in Hanoi yesterday, some buying several at a time.

A health scare?

Experts are conducting tests focused on whether the virus could jump from person to person and Asia grappled with a fourth outbreak in Taiwan.

The outbreak has killed millions of chickens in Viet Nam, South Korea and Japan in December, triggering a health scare across Asia.

Many countries have banned poultry imports from affected areas and the Chinese mainland has ordered people from the three worst-hit countries to be monitored and possibly quarantined.

So far the only human infections from the H5N1 virus have been in Viet Nam.

In the latest cases, an adult died on Wednesday and three people showing symptoms were isolated at a Hanoi hospital.

The infections are believed to have come from contact with droppings from sick birds. Both United Nations agencies and Vietnamese experts have stressed there is no evidence so far to show the virus can spread from person to person.

However, the World Health Organization, which has confirmed three deaths from the H51N virus and is doing tests on some other cases, has warned of dire consequences if the virus mutates.

Professor Hoang Thuy Long, director of the Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology at the Vietnamese Health Ministry, said the Vietnamese authorities were taking the warning very seriously.

Analysis so far suggests all the genes from the H5N1 virus come from animals.

"If a gene was of human origin, there would be a far greater danger of human-to-human transmission. But it appears this is not the case, which is positive," said Pascale Brudon, WHO representative in Hanoi.

Another positive sign is that so far no medical staff treating bird flu patients have become infected, unlike with last year's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome when many doctors and nurses became sick.

Countries respond

Smaller outbreaks in South Korea and Japan, which have yet to be eradicated, have added to anxiety in Asia which is also coping with the re-emergence of SARS in southern China.

China's Taiwan also said on Thursday it was slaughtering 20,000 chickens as a precautionary measure after a different strain of bird flu - the H5N2 virus - had been found at a farm there.

China's Hong Kong, where bird flu killed six people in 1997, has banned all live poultry from affected areas. Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, China's Taiwan Province and China's mainland have also announced restrictions and bans.

Bejing on Thursday asked local health offices to "take rigid measures, such as testing body temperatures and registering health conditions, to quarantine those from the Republic of Korea, Japan and Viet Nam," the Xinhua news agency reported.

In South Korea the highly contagious disease reappeared after hitting 15 areas nationwide last month despite a cull of 1.8 million chickens and ducks.

Japanese officials, meanwhile, said nearly 35,000 chickens had died from flu or been slaughtered at a farm in Yamaguchi prefecture. The farm has been quarantined and disinfection was ongoing on Thursday.

City bans poultry sale

Viet Nam's largest city, Ho Chi Minh, began to ban the sale of poultry from Friday.

A dealer in the local market said that they had been told to remove all live poultry by 4:00 pm (0900 GMT).

The Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Thursday voiced "serious concern" about the outbreak.

Anton Rychener, Viet Nam representative of FAO and WHO had jointly recommended the ban.

"It's all chickens, dead or alive," he said. The ban was necessary because some farmers were balking at culling their flocks, Rychener added.

The deputy chairman of Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, Mai Quoc Binh, signed the ban late on Thursday, which also allows the seizure of chickens and ducks for destruction, the official Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper said.

The city government would pay 15,000 dong (96 US cents) for each seized chicken or duck, Binh was quoted as saying. It was not yet clear if the sale ban would extend to the capital, Hanoi, and other cities.

(China Daily 01/17/2004 page6)