Vietnam decodes bird flu virus
HANOI (AFP) - Vietnamese health authorities said they had decoded the genetic map of the bird flu virus that has killed 15 people in the country and have found no sign of human genes.
The Pasteur Institute said it has sequenced virus samples taken from three of the 23 people confirmed to have been infected with the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian influenza in the country.
The results from the three people, who all came from southern provinces, showed that the H5N1 virus was purely avian in origin and had not acquired any human genes.
The World Health Organization has warned that H5N1 could kill millions across the globe if it combined with a human influenza virus to create a new, highly contagious strain transmissible among humans.
The Pasteur Institute also said it had detected significant changes in the genetic order of the virus from that seen in Hong Kong in 1997, where an outbreak of the disease killed six people.
However, the Ho Chi Minh City-based organization, which is under the control of the health ministry, said the current virus was almost identical to H5N1 samples taken from chickens in Hong Kong in 2001.
Maria Cheng, spokeswoman for the WHO in Vietnam, welcomed the research and its findings.
"It is good to continually analyse the genetic sequence to check if there has been any evolution of the virus," she said.
In human terms, Vietnam is the worst affected of the 10 Asian countries tackling bird flu. Fifteen people have died in the communist nation from the disease, which has also claimed seven lives in Thailand.
H5N1 infections have also broken out in Cambodia, Laos, China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea (news - web sites). Taiwan and Pakistan, as well as parts of the United States and Canada, have reported weaker strains of avian influenza.
Meanwhile, authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have drawn up plans to ban the slaughter of livestock in the city centre by 2010 in a bid to improve food safety standards, state media reported Thursday.
The city will initially open commercial abattoirs at three markets on the outskirts of the city and small city-centre slaughter houses will gradually be phased out. The government is expected to approve the plan next month.
More than 38 million poultry have died or been slaughtered across 57 of Vietnam's 64 provinces and cities as a result of bird flu.
Agence France Presse - February 26, 2004.
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