BRISBANE, Australia (AP) -- Vietnam said Monday it needs tens of millions of dollars to fight the spread of bird flu as disaster coordinators from Pacific rim nations met in Australia to hammer out ways to stop emerging diseases skipping across the region's borders.Vietnam's Vice Minister of Agriculture Bui Ba Bong said the country needs US$50 million (euro41 million) and help building up its stockpile of bird flu drugs as it struggles to keep a lid on the virus."Vietnam wants to use this meeting as an opportunity to ask member countries for cooperation and support," Bong said.Vietnam has been hardest hit by bird flu, which has killed more than 40 people in the country and prompted authorities to destroy tens of millions of poultry.Vietnam has enough antiviral drugs to treat 60,000 people but Bong said the country of 82 million needs far more. Officials said last week they want enough to treat 30 percent of its population.Disaster and pandemic coordinators from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, along with health, animal and quarantine officials, were meeting behind closed doors to formulate a plan on the best ways to deal with various threat levels posed by diseases like bird flu. That includes coordinated responses to humans infected by poultry, limited human-to-human transmission and extensive spread among humans, senior Australian officials have said.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 of the disease."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."You don't learn to dance on the day of the party," he said. "So we have to practice all of our plans and make sure that we are able to implement them effectively."The talks in the eastern Australian city of Brisbane will also discuss how to maintain essential services such as power and water and when it might be appropriate to seal off national borders."It's going to be an opportunity for us to look at what preparations we've made, and then improve (on) those if we have to and, perhaps, set up some region-wide, APEC response mechanism, if that's really called for," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told the Nine television network.The meeting comes as a precursor to the APEC forum summit that is expected to bring top officials together in Busan, South Korea, in mid-November. Fighting avian influenza and trying to prevent a flu pandemic are expected to be high on the agenda there.The region got a taste of the devastation from an infectious disease in 2003 when SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, emerged in Asia and spread rapidly across the world via air travel, killing nearly 800 people and causing millions of dollars in economic losses.Later that same year, the H5N1 bird flu virus began ravaging poultry stocks across the region and jumping from birds to people. Since then, it has killed at least 62 people in Southeast Asia, and health experts worry the virus could eventually be capable of causing much more harm.As migratory birds spread the H5N1 virus to poultry in Europe, many more nations are expressing the same concerns, fearing the virus -- which is now hard for humans to catch -- could somehow mutate into a highly contagious form that spreads easily from person to person. The result could be a global pandemic that kills millions and cripples economies.Steadman said delegates in Brisbane were coming to the conclusion that individual nations could not tackle a pandemic."We're recognizing that no single economy can deal effectively with one of these emergencies by themselves," he said.APEC members include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Taipei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, United States and Vietnam.Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar were expected to attend the meeting as observers along with several international organizations.Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.