Bird flu spreads in Vietnam, experts downplay mutation fears
HANOI - Bird flu has spread to a 10th province in Vietnam, health officials said as experts downplayed reports the virus may be mutating into a more lethal form.
The latest outbreak was in the northern port city of Haiphong, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Hanoi, said government officials amid warnings that cold and wet winter weather would help the disease spread.
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai called the fight against bird flu an "urgent and most important task for the entire political system and the entire society," state media reported.
He urged authorities to immediately vaccinate poultry, especially on large farms, and set up grassroots bird-flu monitoring in all villages.
Health experts, meanwhile, sought to ease fears after the Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City had said in a brief Vietnamese-language report on its website that the virus had shown signs of mutation this year.
The institute's online report had said that "the H5N1 type noticed among people and poultry in early 2005 has undergone some changes, facilitating its reproduction in cells of mammals and making it more dangerous".
Scientists warn that the virus, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since late 2003, could mutate and combine with human flu variants, making it easily transmissible among humans and creating a global pandemic.
But the institute's director Nguyen Thi Kim Tien told AFP that "the result of the research was not of any surprise" and added that the "changes in the virus are also not that significant".
The World Health Organisation's spokeswoman in Hanoi, Dida Connor, also said mutations were not out of the ordinary and that differences in the genetic sequences of the virus had been noticed previously.
"We know that influenza viruses are prone to mutation and we have seen differences in genetic sequences of H5N1 strains before," she said.
"It is sometimes difficult to directly link specific changes in the genetic sequence to changes in virus behaviour, including its ability to infect humans," Connor said.
The institute on its website had also said that bird flu virus samples had shown resistance to the anti-viral drug amantadine, but Connor pointed out that such resistance had been known "for some time."
Vietnam has been hit by a new wave of avian influenza outbreaks in poultry since early last month, infecting flocks in 10 of the country's 64 provinces.
More than 33,000 birds have died from the virus or been culled as a precautionary measure this season.
Vietnam last week reported its first human bird flu death in more than three months. Several suspected cases are being treated in hospitals in the country's central and northern provinces.
Vietnamese official figures show a total of 92 human cases of bird flu since late 2003, with 42 deaths.
Seven of the 10 provinces affected so far by the most recent poultry infections are in Vietnam's cooler north, and officials warn this could signal trouble in the months to come.
"We are entering the winter season," said Nguyen Van Thong, deputy director of the animal health department. "The wet and cool weather creates a good environment for the virus to develop."
Agence France Presse - November 14, 2005.
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