Vietnam’s prime minister ordered all local governments and ministries to heighten vigilance against bird flu out of fear that some provinces have dropped their guard in the fight against the disease, state-controlled media reported today.

“Some provinces have shown complacency in bird flu prevention and control,” Prime Minister Phan Van Khai said in the telegram sent yesterday, which was published in part in the Labourer newspaper and posted on the Ministry of Health Web site.

It said control over the transport and trade of poultry has loosened, especially across Vietnam’s borders. The delay of the 2006 poultry vaccination campaign and weakened controls over slaughtering practices also could increase the risk of bird flu re-emerging, it said.

Khai urged local governments to strive to detect bird flu outbreaks early, disinfect poultry farms and speed up the vaccination campaigns.

The prime minister also ordered customs officials, market inspectors and border guards to tighten cross-border trade of poultry and asked for severe punishment for anyone caught smuggling birds into the country.

Vietnam has reported no bird flu outbreaks over the past three months and no human infection since November.

Bird flu has killed at least 98 people – nearly half in Vietnam – since the H5N1 virus began ravaging poultry stocks in late 2003, according to World Health Organisation figures. Health experts fear the virus could mutate into a form easily passed among people, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide. So far, most human cases have been traced to contact with infected birds.

Meanwhile, authorities in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku plan to kill stray cats and dogs over fears that they might spread bird flu, officials said yesterday.

Three people died recently from the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in the former Soviet republic, officials said earlier this week.

“In the framework of measures to prevent the spread of bird flu, we have launched steps including raids to collect stray cats and dogs and dispose of them,” said the head of the state veterinary service, Yolchu Khanveli.

:: The UN health agency says it would like to make public a confidential database it maintains on bird flu research, but that it is up to countries and scientists to agree on sharing their information.

The password-protected database, details of which were first reported on earlier this month in articles by the journal Science and The Wall Street Journal, was created in 2003 at the request of south-east Asian countries first hit by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Dick Thompson, spokesman for infectious diseases at the World Health Organisation.

WHO has been urging countries and researchers to allow genetic sequences of the virus stored in the database to be made available publicly, but countries and scientists have so far resisted, Thompson said.

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