An officer inspects chickens and ducks on sale at a market in Ho Chi Minh City. (AFP)

Hanoi, Jan. 13 (Reuters): Asia faced a new health scare today after three Vietnamese died from “bird flu”, but the WHO said there are no signs yet an outbreak that has ravaged the region’s poultry industry is spreading between people.

“The evidence to date is that there is no sign of human-to-human transmission,” Dr Shigeru Omi of the World Health Organisation said in a statement.

But he said the consequences would be dire if the virus latched on to the human influenza virus and spread among people, who have little immune protection against the strain.

“The ensuing virus would then be highly pathogenic and transmissible,” said Omi, the WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific.

In a region already alarmed by the return of Sars, health officials say they are worried by the rapid spread of H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, in Japan, South Korean and Vietnam.

The Paris-based world animal disease body OIE said it would send scientists to Asia to investigate the outbreaks, which it said could pose a serious threat to humans under certain conditions.

The OIE group would start in Vietnam, where the WHO said tests conducted by a Hong Kong laboratory confirmed that bird flu killed one adult and two children from the Hanoi area.

They were among 14 people who fell ill with influenza in Hanoi and surrounding provinces. Eleven of the 13 children and the mother of one of the children died.

Omi said there was no evidence so far linking the remaining cases to the flu virus that has killed nearly one million chickens in Vietnam. But investigators are exploring the possibility they were exposed to the same poultry.

The H5N1 avian flu virus spreads rapidly among poultry but rarely infects humans. Six people died in Hong Kong in 1997 during an outbreak of avian influenza and last year it infected a father and son in the crowded city.

Hanoi declared last week that it had been struck by a fast-spreading bird flu that has hit other countries in Asia, which has a vast poultry industry.

South Korea, which has already culled nearly two million chickens and ducks, reported its first new case of avian flu in more than a week today, dashing hopes the outbreak was subsiding. Hundreds of people living in affected areas have been given blood tests, although a health official said today no one had shown symptoms of the disease.

In Japan, where the first bird flu outbreak in years was reported yesterday, the government vowed to protect consumers already worried about the safety of beef, fish and eggs.

Thailand, which produces about one billion chickens a year, said it was free of bird flu but was battling an outbreak of poultry cholera. “I would like to insist that Thailand is free of bird flu,” Nirundorn Aungtragoolsuk, director of the agriculture ministry’s Livestock Disease Control Division, said.