2 countries seek help from their neighbors

More than 40 people have been killed in Vietnam; four have died in Cambodia.
BRISBANE, Australia (AP) -- Vietnam and Cambodia appealed Monday for help from their neighbors to combat bird flu as disaster coordinators from Pacific rim nations met to explore ways to stop the deadly disease from skipping across the region's borders.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer urged calm, telling a news conference, "there is no need to panic at this stage and we shouldn't overstate the risk."
Vietnam and Cambodia appealed for financial and technical aid from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, saying they simply don't have the resources to fight the disease alone.
Vietnam has been hardest hit by bird flu, which has killed more than 40 people in the communist country and prompted authorities to destroy tens of millions of poultry. At least 62 people have died of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in Southeast Asia since 2003.
Vice Minister of Agriculture Bui Ba Bong said Vietnam needs $50 million and help building its stockpile of bird flu drugs. "Vietnam wants to use this meeting as an opportunity to ask member countries for cooperation and support," he said.
Pleading for assistance
Vietnam has enough antiviral drugs to treat 60,000 people, but Bong said the country needs far more. Officials said last week they want enough to treat 30 percent of the 8.2 million population.
Impoverished Cambodia, which has logged four human deaths, also needs help from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization and richer countries "in terms of financial resources and technical assistance," said Prak Thaveak Amida, deputy director general of Cambodia's ministry of agriculture.
"We cannot work on our own. We need to have international collaboration," he said.
Meanwhile, Japanese officials planned Monday to slaughter 82,000 more chickens after signs of bird flu were detected at a farm northeast of Tokyo, and authorities in Thailand said a 50-year-old woman was diagnosed with the disease. The woman -- the 20th case of infection in Thailand -- was in stable condition in a Bangkok hospital.
Disaster and pandemic coordinators from APEC countries, along with health, animal and quarantine officials, met behind closed doors to formulate a plan on the best ways to deal with the threat posed by bird flu and other emerging diseases.
Doug Steadman of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said experts were exchanging their experiences of dealing with outbreaks.
Canada dealt with SARS in 2003 and had a bird flu outbreak in 2004, although it was not the deadly H5N1 strain.
"We were far from perfect with the way we dealt with that," Steadman said. "We were effective in the end, but we learned a lot and we're bringing that experience to this conference."
Steadman stressed that nations need to test their preparedness now.