Vietnam to send army, police to fight bird flu
HANOI - Vietnam, the country worst hit by bird flu, will send soldiers and police to help contain the spread of the virus as more outbreaks erupt and the sudden death of ducks in two provinces hints at a more virulent strain.
Bird flu, which experts fear could trigger a human pandemic, has been spreading fast in Vietnam but provincial authorities were not showing enough urgency, Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat said on Thursday.
"We must launch a campaign to build each hamlet, each commune into a stronghold for fighting the epidemic," Phat was quoted as saying in Nong Nghiep Vietnam, a newspaper run by his ministry.
"In an emergency, the army will be deployed to isolate the infected area."
The ministry's emergency plan, seen by Reuters, said police, paramilitary and health workers should join forces to disinfect the site of an outbreak, destroy sick poultry and man checkpoints around it.
The plan comes as Truong Van Dung, head of the Veterinary Institute, told a government meeting bird flu may have become more virulent. He cited the death within three to four hours of ducks in Bac Giang province, which showed no symptoms of the virus while alive but tested positive after their death for H5N1.
There was no further proof that H5N1 had become more virulent but many ducks also died quickly in a field in Hai Duong province, the Nong Nghiep Vietnam newspaper said.
The agriculture ministry said two outbreaks this week killed more than 1,300 fowl in Bac Giang and Quang Nam and Thursday's state media reported 2,100 ducks and chickens died or were slaughtered in the provinces of Hai Duong and Quang Ngai.
A ministry report said 300 ducks died in the central province of Quang Nam and animal health workers slaughtered another 1,000 while tests for bird flu were still under way.
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Agriculture Minister Phat urged local authorities to provide more information to farmers on the epidemic to help detect outbreaks quickly.
Around 30 million ducks, or 60 percent of Vietnam's waterfowl, carry the H5 component of the virus, Phat has said.
"Poultry slaughter should be centralised so the animal health work can be done better," Phat said on state-run Voice of Vietnam radio.
Vietnam's three deputy prime ministers and six ministers on Monday started touring different areas in a two-week campaign to shake up prevention plans and preparations for a pandemic.
Since bird flu arrived in December 2003, 92 people in Vietnam are known to have caught the virus and 42 have died, fanning the fears of experts that the virus could mutate into a form passed easily between people, which it cannot now.
The latest Vietnamese bird flu victim was a 35-year-old man in Hanoi who died in late October.
But a suspected case, that of a 24-year-old woman from Bac Giang province, turned out to be a false alarm, Pham Ngoc Dinh, deputy head of the National Hygiene and Epidemiology Institute, was quoted on Thursday as saying by state media.
Reuters - 10 Novembre 2005
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