Farmers 'key to bird-flu control'
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 Doctors and scientists have gathered in Vietnam to discuss the possible ways to stop bird flu
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HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Small-scale farmers across Asia will need to modify their animal husbandry practices if a bird-flu pandemic is to be avoided, world health experts have been told.
In particular, farmers will need to start fencing off poultry and animals to stop viruses spreading to humans and mutating into deadlier varieties.
The spread of the virus needed to be stemmed at the source, delegates at a three-day conference on bird-flu, being held in the Vietnamese capital of Ho Chi Minh City heard Thursday.
"This means addressing the transmission of the virus where the disease occurs, in poultry, specifically free-range chickens and wetland dwelling ducks, and thus curbing the disease occurrence in the region before it spreads to other parts of the world," Dr. Samuel Jutzi of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said.
Changing traditional farming practices, however, is acknowledged as a massive task.
"That is the main challenge," U.N. FAO representative Anton Rychener told CNN.
Chickens would need to be fenced, he said.
"If animals are not controlled, then this will be a problem for a long time."
Keeping animals, such as ducks and other migratory birds that carry the virus with no visible symptoms, away from poultry and people will be another critical challenge for the region's farmers.
A team of international delegates from the conference traveled to a chicken farm on Wednesday to see how the birds are raised and farmed in Vietnam.
The farm, which sells its produce in Ho Chi Minh City, has not been affected by the bird flu virus.
"I have the impression that it is quite a highly secure operation, well managed, technically perfect, I think. And from the point of view of costs for the operation, I believe it's okay," Jutzi said after touring the facility.
But this operation was hardly typical of Vietnamese poultry farms, where traditionally the animals live in close, often unsanitary, quarters with people, and where few can afford to adopt the higher hygiene standards.
About 90 percent of Vietnam's 14 million farm families raise poultry in their backyard, rather than in cages.
Asian countries have documented 55 cases in which the avian flu has jumped from birds to humans.
And though only one of those cases involved human-to-human transmission, experts believe that avian flu has the potential to kill millions of people, particularly if the virus mutates.
World Health Organization officials say the so-called bird flu was identified last year in 10 countries and is currently circulating in four: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.
It has an astonishingly high mortality rate: of the more than 50 people who have been infected with the disease, more than 40 have died.
"Treatment for those infected is not very good. Many people have died," Dr Daniel Blumenthal, principal investigator of the Prevention Research Center at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, said.
He said that while bird flu had the potential to become a pandemic, people should not be panicking yet.
"I have to say that I think it's too soon to panic. I think that Avian flu has been with us for a long time, very recently we've noticed that it can jump occasionally from birds to people and even more rarely, from one person to another, but so far there's no evidence of an epidemic."
Vietnam, meanwhile has appealed for technical and financial help to fight the virus, Reuters reports.
Bui Quang Anh, head of the Agriculture's Ministry's Animal Health Department, said Vietnam's first priority was to expand provincial laboratories to help diagnose the disease.
Copyright 2005 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
