Scientists are trying to identify a possible link between an influenza in Viet Nam that killed 11 people and a flu that wiped out nearly one million chickens, officials and the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

Transmission of bird flu to humans is rare but the deaths come during growing fears of a new outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome after China confirmed one case of the disease and two suspected cases.

Vietnamese officials said they were hunting for evidence to link the two kinds of influenza, which are caused by viruses. "We do not exclude the bird flu as the cause of the (human) deaths but we need scientific evidence," Dau Ngoc Hao, deputy director of the veterinary department of Viet Nam's agriculture ministry, told Reuters.

Three of the people who died were infected with avian flu, said Pascale Brudon, Viet Nam representative of WHO. But it was not yet determined if all three had the same virus and tests on the others were pending, she told Reuters.

"We don't make the direct link (from chickens) for the time being," she said.

The biggest outbreak of bird flu in humans took place in Hong Kong in 1997 and 1998, killing six people.

WHO SENDS SCIENTIST TO VIET NAM

In Manila, a WHO spokesman said the body was sending a scientist to help investigate the confirmed outbreak in Viet Nam, but declined to discuss specifics until details were ironed out with the government.

"Our team in Hanoi is talking to the Ministry of Health about clearing a statement. Until that is done, my lips are sealed," said Peter Cordingley, a spokesman for the WHO's Western Pacific headquarters in Manila.

"As I speak, at the airport is one of our virologists who is going into Hanoi from Manila."

Hao said Viet Nam sent samples of the bird flu virus to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday for DNA analysis and results were expected in a week.

Hanoi declared last week it had been struck by a fast-spreading bird flu that has hit other countries in Asia, Japan the most recent among them. South Korea has culled hundreds of thousands of chickens.

The outbreak came just weeks before Viet Nam's biggest holiday, Tet, or the Lunar New Year.

Vietnamese doctors have concluded that 10 children aged between nine months and 12 years, and one woman, are among those who died from the airborne H3N2 influenza virus type A, but Hanoi says the disease is not an epidemic nor a repeat of SARS.

Brudon said she believed the recent human flu outbreak was not widespread and had been contained.

Nguyen Van Loc, deputy director of the Central Paediatric Hospital in Hanoi said it has been treating two more children, one of them improving, though the other needed help breathing.

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