Woman tests positive for both HIV, bird flu in a first in Vietnam
HANOI - A 21-year-old woman in northern Vietnam has tested positive for HIV and bird flu in the country's first such case, a health official said. The woman, whose name was withheld, lives in Quang Ninh province, 200 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of Hanoi. She tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus early this week, said doctor Nguyen Hong Hanh, deputy director of the provincial hospital.
"She was admitted with high fever towards the end of March in the Quang Ninh hospital and at first tested positive for HIV," Hanh said. The poultry vendor was later, "transferred to the Institute of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi where doctors then took samples to be tested at the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology in the capital." She returned to Quang Ninh and, "is now being treated by us," Hanh said, adding that the results of a second test confirmed she had bird flu. "According to the information we received from the health ministry, this is officially the first simultaneous case of bird flu and HIV in Vietnam," Hanh said. It was also the first confirmed bird flu case in the province, he said, adding that "right now she has no fever and is in a stable condition."
Since the end of 2003, bird flu has killed 36 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and three Cambodians. Thirty-five of Vietnam's 64 provinces and cities have been hit by the virus this year. According to an official report, all but one is now clear of the disease. Vietnam recently started a campaign to clean up farms in an effort to try to wipe out the bird flu virus. The country keeps reporting human casualties at regular intervals, even though the disease has been waning in poultry. Health experts have warned the H5N1 virus could lead to a pandemic if it mutated into a form which could be easily transmitted between humans.
Agence France Presse - April 14, 2005
Vietnam finds HIV carrier infected with bird flu
HANOI - A 21-year-old woman has been infected by both the deadly HIV/AIDS virus and bird flu, the first such case in Vietnam, health officials said Thursday. The Health Ministry said two other patients have been diagnosed with the H5N1 virus in the northern provinces of Ha Tay and Hung Yen between April 2 and 8 but no deaths were reported.
The latest findings brought to 41 the total number of patients with bird flu in Vietnam since December 2004, 16 of whom have died, the ministry said in a statement. Nguyen Van Thich, head of the Center for Preventive Medicine in the northern province of Quang Ninh, said the woman, the first to be diagnosed with both bird flu and HIV in Vietnam, used to work at a hairdressor's shop. She was hospitalized in late March with fever and coughing.
"She is still very weak," he told Reuters, adding that the woman has been treated at a provincial hospital. Quang Ninh province bordering China has one of the highest number of HIV carriers in Vietnam, most of them drug addicts and prostitutes. Vietnam has reported 68 human infections of the H5N1 virus since the disease first hit Asia in late 2003, killing 36 Vietnamese.
Twelve Thais and three Cambodians have also died of the virus that the World Health Organization says has the potential to mutate into a form that could pass easily between humans and cause a pandemic in which millions could die. Doctor Nguyen Tran Hien, director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, was quoted Thursday by state media as saying Vietnam has taken nearly 1,000 blood samples from the patients, birds and water fowl infected by bird flu to help identify the map of the virus allocation.
Hien said the H5N1 virus tested this year showed it has changed slightly from the type that struck in 2004, its virulence was less but the speed of its spread was higher, reported the state-run Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper. Some samples had been sent for further testing in the United States and the final results to confirm the difference would be available later this month, Hien said.
The Agriculture Ministry said poultry outbreaks have now been reported only in the southern province of Tra Vinh in the Mekong Delta where the virus broke anew last December and spread to 35 of Vietnam's 64 provinces. Doctor Hoang Thuy Long, former head of the institute, told a government meeting Wednesday that most of the infected people in Vietnam, including several family clusters, had contact with sick birds.
"Even though so far the transmission mechanism of the disease remains unclear, the avian influenza H5N1 type in Vietnam shows no sign of being spread directly between human and human," Long was quoted by state-run Quan Doi Nhan Dan daily as saying.
Reuters - April 14, 2005
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