If you’ve been following the stories about avian flu in Vietnam (and now Thailand), a story from last Wednesday sets an even more potentially disastrous scenario than most people initially thought:

There’ve been nearly 900,0000 chickens that farmers have sold to the market from the beginning of January, mostly from Long An and Tine Giang,” said Nguyen Van Thong, deputy director of the veterinary department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, referring to the two hardest-hit provinces. The chickens were still alive when sold.

900,000. There’s a lot of potential there for a major health disaster, even moreso if the virus mutates, as Erik over at Vegan.com has mentioned.

This is also interesting because I’ve been to Long An. My mother-in-law’s boyfriend’s family lives there, and when I traveled to Vietnam with my wife and her mother back in 1998, we stopped in Long An a number of times. Coincidentally, Long An is where I had water with ice—the only time during my entire trip since the ice is usually chopped on the sidewalk—and I got extremely sick for three days because of it.

My mother-in-law is currently in Vietnam visiting family. I’m curious what the mood is like in Vietnam right now, but we haven’t gotten any e-mail from her since the avian flu was first discovered. We wrote to her to tell her, “Don’t eat the chicken.”

A new development today: KFC in Vietnam has switched to serving fish.

Six people have died thusfar from the flu.