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The Vietnam News

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Suspected enterovirus 71 kills 26 infants in southern Vietnam

HANOI - A suspected outbreak of enterovirus 71 (EV71) has killed 26 children under the age of three in southern Vietnam since the end of January.

Huynh Thu Thuy, a spokeswoman for the health ministry's Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City, said 40 children have been infected with what they feared was EV71, which produces symptoms ranging from fever and diarrhoea to extreme neurological complications such as viral meningitis and encephalitis and hand-foot-and-mouth disease.

"We are temporarily calling the illness 'acute encephalitis syndrome' but most clinical experts suspect it is enterovirus 71," she said Tuesday. "All the children are under the age of three."

Samples from the infected children have been sent to laboratories in Japan and the United States to confirm if the disease is EV71, but the results have not yet come back, she said. Nineteen children died at Ho Chi Minh City's Paediatric Hospital Number 1, while seven others passed away in An Giang hospital in Long Xuyen, the capital of An Giang province.

Taiwan suffered a major outbreak of the disease in 1998 that left 78 dead, and smaller outbreaks recurred in 2000 and 2001. Health professionals identified the outbreak as possible EV71 because of a large number of hand-foot-and-mouth disease cases and the rapid deaths of children. EV71 was first isolated in California in 1969 and has since spread to many parts of the world.

Agence France Presse - 13 Mai 2003