HANOI, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Vietnam has ordered a mass slaughter of chickens and ducks in two Mekong Delta provinces where bird flu outbreaks were confirmed this week, officials said on Friday. A total of 250 ducks were found dead in two communes in Ca Mau and Bac Lieu provinces where nearly 8,400 chickens and ducklings have been killed by the H5N1 virus or slaughtered to stop it spreading, the Agriculture Ministry said. On Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung ordered the mass slaughter of fowl in the infected areas, Hoang Van Nam, deputy head of the ministry's Animal Health Department, said in a report seen by Reuters. "The recurrence of bird flu in these two provinces is extremely serious," Nam quoted Hung as telling officials at an extraordinary meeting in Ho Chi Minh City on Friday. Hung ordered animal health workers in Ca Mau and Bac Lieu to finish slaughtering fowl by the end of Saturday and said more monitoring of public health was needed to ensure safety in the poultry-infected areas. The outbreaks of the H5N1 virus were the first in Vietnam since August. The initial eruptions killed around 6,000 newly hatched chickens and ducklings that were not vaccinated against bird flu. Farmers have since thrown dead birds into water channels or let ducks roam on rice fields, helping spread the virus that first arrived in the Delta in late 2003 and has since killed 42 of the 93 people infected in Vietnam. Vietnam, which has had no human bird flu cases since late 2005, has a human death toll second only to Indonesia's 57, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO says bird flu has killed 154 people out of 258 infected globally since late 2003. Officials say temperatures now falling in the southern region incorporating the Delta would help the spread of a virus that thrives best in cooler temperatures. Experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that is easily transmissible among humans and spark an influenza pandemic that would kill millions. Vietnam has banned the hatching of waterfowl -- which can carry bird flu without showing any symptoms -- since early last year, but Mekong Delta farmers say the lost income had made life has much harder. Agriculture officials have said the ban on breeding ducks in the Mekong Delta food basket has also affected production of the recent summer-autumn rice crop because ducks are the natural enemy of rice-eating brown grasshoppers. The problem with the pests booming in the delta has cut part of this year's rice output, prompting the government to ban the signature of all rice export contracts since Nov. 12.
