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The Vietnam News

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Vietnamese divided on Tet chicken

HANOI - Sixty years ago in the Year of the Rooster, when famine killed millions of Vietnamese, most could only dream of eating chicken, an essential part of Lunar New Year celebrations. With the Year of the Rooster arriving again in the 12-year lunar cycle, there is plenty of chicken in the markets but many Vietnamese are not buying because of fears over the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.

"It's not safe. We dare not eat chicken as we have TV reporting every day about people dying from bird flu and of new outbreaks in poultry," a 46-year-old university lecturer told Reuters as she left Hanoi's Duc Vien market. Experts say properly cooked chicken is no danger but that is a hard sell after 13 people have died of bird flu in Vietnam over the past month, all infected by direct contact with sick birds, casting a cloud over next week's Tet Lunar New Year celebrations.

Vendors selling roasted ducks, pigeons and chickens at the front gate of Duc Vien market lit up their displays on Thursday in hopes of attracting customers. Few stopped to buy. In another downtown market, no live birds were for sale and slaughtered chickens lay on stainless steel tables while vendors chatted among themselves in the absence of customers. In Ho Chi Minh City, many of its 10 million people felt the same.

"Many markets have not been selling chicken in the past two weeks as they have no buyers," said businesswoman Pham Thi Lan, 34. "I won't let my family eat chicken or eggs." Vietnam's third outbreak of bird flu since the virus first appeared in Asia at the end of 2003 began in the Mekong Delta in December.

It has now reached half 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 -- since it surfaced. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said the looming Tet celebrations -- with many people and poultry on the move -- meant Vietnam was at a critical juncture. Urban residents said they had switched to beef, pork or sea food.

But it's not easy to give up chicken, which is ranked first among the essential foods in a Vietnamese proverb: "Chicken, rice, raw fish." "We will eat it as usual. My husband said we must have it," said a crab noodle seller in Hanoi. Some housewives said they would keep feeding their family chicken as long as they knew where it came from or carried a quality certificate.

"I will keep eating it, but I have to be more careful," said Nguyen Thi Tu, 67, as she returned home from a market outside Ho Chi Minh City with two chickens and a pair of ducks struggling for space in her bag.

Reuters - February 4, 2005


Vietnam duck crackdown in bird flu crisis

Vietnam has temporarily banned duck breeding and the sale of hatchlings nationwide in an effort to control the rapid spread of the bird flu virus that has killed 12 people in the communist country over the past five weeks, officials said today. Prime Minister Phan Van Khai issued the order Thursday.

“In a short time, the number of people who died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu has continued to rise nationwide, seriously affecting people’s health and lives,” today’s Communist Party newspaper, the People, quoted Khai’s decree as saying. All duck breeding facilities nationwide will be shut down immediately as a result, said Bui Quang Anh, director of the national Department of Animal Health. Anh said ducks pose a greater threat than chickens in spreading the virus because they can be infected without being sick. “That’s why it’s difficult to control,” he said.

A bird flu outbreak in 2004 spread to 10 Asian countries, forcing the slaughter of more than 100 million birds and jumping to humans in Vietnam, Thailand and – most recently – Cambodia. Forty-five people have died in the past year, most of them in Vietnam, where 12 have been killed since Dec. 30.

Ducks, a major poultry industry in southern Vietnam, roam freely in the vast network of canals and flooded rice fields, posing a danger of spreading the virus further through their droppings. It was not clear when the ban on duck breeding and the sale of hatchlings would be lifted.

The Press Association (.uk) - February 4, 2005