Vietnam has imported additional 150 million doses of vaccines against bird flu viruses among fowls from China, local newspaper Pioneer reported Friday.

The vaccines worth 1 million U.S. dollars will be used early this year, the paper quoted the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development as saying.

About 246 million poultry turns (each dose for a fowl being considered one turn, two doses for the same fowl regarded as two turns) have been vaccinated since August 2005. The ministry's Department of Animal Health on Feb. 1 said 21 cities and provinces nationwide, which had been hit by bird flu since early October 2005, detected no new outbreaks for at least three weeks, meeting criteria to declare their territory free of the disease.

In late November 2005, the department's director Bui Quang Anh told Xinhua that Vietnam had set aside state money of 60 billion Vietnamese dong (nearly 3.8 million U.S. dollars) for importing vaccines. By that time, the country had purchased 340 million doses of bird flu vaccines from China, and 6 million doses from the Netherlands and France each.

Source: Xinhua