BRISBANE, Australia (AP) – Vietnam and Cambodia appealed Monday for help from their neighbors to combat bird flu as disaster coordinators from Pacific rim nations met to explore ways to stop the deadly disease from skipping across the region’s borders.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer urged calm, telling a news conference, “there is no need to panic at this stage and we shouldn’t overstate the risk.”

Vietnam and Cambodia appealed for financial and technical aid from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, saying they simply don’t have the resources to fight the disease alone.

Vietnam has been hardest hit by bird flu, which has killed more than 40 people in the communist country and prompted authorities to destroy tens of millions of poultry. At least 62 people have died of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in Southeast Asia since 2003.

Vice Minister of Agriculture Bui Ba Bong said Vietnam needs $50 million and help building up its stockpile of bird flu drugs. “Vietnam wants to use this meeting as an opportunity to ask member countries for cooperation and support,” he said.

Vietnam has enough antiviral drugs to treat 60,000 people, but Bong said the country needs far more. Officials said last week they want enough to treat 30 percent of the 8.2 million population.

Impoverished Cambodia, which has logged four human deaths, also needs help from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization and richer countries “in terms of financial resources and technical assistance,” said Prak Thaveak Amida, deputy director general of Cambodia’s ministry of agriculture.

“We cannot work on our own. We need to have international collaboration,” he said.

Meanwhile, Japanese officials planned Monday to slaughter 82,000 more chickens after signs of bird flu were detected at a farm northeast of Tokyo, and authorities in Thailand said a 50-year-old woman was diagnosed with the disease. The woman _ the 20th case of infection in Thailand _ was in stable condition in a Bangkok hospital.

Disaster and pandemic coordinators from APEC countries, along with health, animal and quarantine officials, met behind closed doors to formulate a plan on the best ways to deal with the threat posed by bird flu and other emerging diseases.

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.”

Canadian officials said Monday that about 30 ducks had tested positive for an H5 strain of bird flu, but further tests were needed to determine if it was the deadly H5N1 strain.

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 two-day meeting 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.

The meeting comes ahead of the APEC summit that is expected to bring top officials together in Busan, South Korea, in mid-November. Fighting bird flu and trying to prevent a flu pandemic will be high on the agenda.

The region got a taste of the devastation from an infectious disease when SARS emerged in Asia two years ago 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. Health experts worry the virus could mutate and spark a human flu pandemic that kills millions and cripples economies.

Steadman said delegates in Brisbane were coming to the conclusion that everyone is at risk unless countries can work together to address potential threats.

“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, the United States and Vietnam.