The health ministry of Vietnam however said that they should not get complacent

The government of Vietnam has recently come into some praise from the Food and Agriculture Organisation who commended the efficiency and organisation of their response to bird flu outbreaks in the country. At a conference organised to jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Vietnam government ideas and initiatives were discussed to contain outbreaks of the bird flu virus in the region.

Vietnam has been bird flu free for a year now with the exception of a few birds that had not been vaccinated in line with establish procedures.  No human cases of the deadly disease have been reported in Vietnam for seventeen months.

The Vietnamese government has been very efficient in setting up surveillance groups and has acted extremely quickly to cull all poultry that showed signs of the disease. They have also enforced strict rules on the moving of chickens and other poultry as well as thoroughly disinfecting all areas where outbreaks had been seen. Another thing that they did which was in fact extremely difficult to convince farmers to do was initiate a complete ban on the sale of live poultry in urban market areas. 

The health ministry of Vietnam however said that they should not get complacent and that there were many areas where improvements could be made to existing regulations. For example despite urging from the government families are still keeping live chickens in their backyards. A lot of human cases of bird flu have started in families who keep in close contact with their poultry. Very often it is the children who first get the disease as they are closer to the animals and regularly play with them in the backyards of their houses.

However it is a cultural thing for families in Vietnam to keep a few chickens running around and thus the government is faced with an uphill struggle in convincing people that they must not keep poultry in their homes.