GENEVA, Aug. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- The World Health Organization (WHO)said Friday that its staff in Vietnam met with the country's health authorities to discuss a new outbreak of bird flu which haskilled three people to date.

    Staff from the WHO's Vietnam country office met with the Ministry of Health on Friday to gather further details about thesecases and develop plans for containing the disease, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told reporters.

    Vietnam's government informed WHO on Thursday that three recentdeaths from influenza-like symptoms in the country were caused by bird flu and announced an initial series of measures aimed at controlling the disease in poultry and preventing further cases inhumans.

    These are the first officially reported cases of bird flu in Vietnam since late February.

    The three cases are among a group of patients, admitted to hospitals between July 19 and Aug. 8. Two of them occurred in the northern Ha Tay province while the third case occurred in the southern province of Hau Giang.

    Initial tests have identified the virus as belonging to the H5 subtype. Further testing is needed to determine whether the virus belongs to the same H5N1 strain that caused 22 cases including 15 deaths in Vietnam and 12 cases including eight deaths in Thailand earlier this year.

    To date, H5N1 is the only strain of the H5 sub-type known to jump directly from infected poultry to affect humans.

    WHO regards it as particularly important that viruses from these cases be made available for further analysis by laboratoriesin the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network.

    Further studies can help determine whether the virus has mutated and thus yield valuable information about the further evolution of the outbreak, the risks to human and the best preventive measures, said Chaib.

    Studies of the virus are also important in the further development, presently under way, of an effective human vaccine, she added. Enditem