The United Nations has urged countries against culling wild birds in their fight to halt bird flu and has said the main concern must be tackling the disease in poultry.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) issued the warning after reports that wild birds were being killed in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam as a precautionary measure.
A pet bird on sale in Shanghai's Bird, Fish and Insect market today
"This is unlikely to make any significant contribution to the protection of humans against avian influenza,"said Juan Lubroth, a FAO official with responsibility for infectious animal diseases.
"There are other, much more important measures to be considered that deserve priority attention. Fighting the disease in poultry must remain the main focus of attention," he added.
The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu virus is known to have infected 133 people in Asia since late 2003, killing 68 of them.
It remains difficult for people to catch, but experts fear it could mutate and become easily passed from person to person, sparking a global pandemic in which millions could die.
Another senior FAO official said wild birds found around Ho Chi Minh City were highly unlikely to carry the H5N1 virus, while Vietnam as a whole had some 43 million domestic ducks - which are very susceptible to the disease.
"Culling the wild birds is time consuming and costly and risks distracting authorities from the real risk, which is the one posed by poultry," FAO officer Jan Slingenbergh said.
"Controlling the virus in poultry is the most effective way of limiting the likelihood of the bird flu virus acquiring human-to-human transmissibility," he added.