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The Vietnam News

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Bird flu sweeps through Vietnam

HANOI - A man who tested positive for avian flu has died in Vietnam, becoming the country's 10th victim of the disease in the past month, a doctor said on Friday. "The victim died Thursday afternoon after he tested positive to bird flu," said the doctor at Hanoi's Bach Mai hospital. The 32-year-old man came from the province of Phu Tho, 80km northeast of the capital Hanoi, which is in northern Vietnam.

A doctor in the south of the country said on Friday that two girls who had also tested positive for bird flu were in a critical condition in Ho Chi Minh City's Pediatric Hospital No1. The H5N1 strain of the virus has claimed 10 lives in Vietnam, most of them the south of the country, since December 30 and 30 since the end of 2003.

Swept across Asia

Twelve people have also died in Thailand from the virus that has swept Asia since December 2003. A man who was the first person in northern Vietnam to contract the disease was to be discharged from hospital on Friday, a doctor at Hanoi's Institute of Tropical Diseases emergency department told AFP. Hanoi resident Nguyen Thanh Hung, 42, lost his brother to bird flu this month. Their youngest brother also tested positive for the virus but did not show any symptoms. The World Health Organisation has said however that more tests were needed to confirm his infection.

The bird flu virus has now spread to 27 of Vietnam's 64 cities and provinces. More than 812 000 poultry have been culled since the start of the year in a bid to stem the spread of the disease, which can be picked up from infected birds. However demand for poultry is expected to boom during next month's Lunar New Year holidays, risking the further spread of the virus to humans.

Agence France Presse - 28 Janvier 2005


Vietnam deploys bird flu riot police, another dies

HANOI - Vietnam has deployed riot police at bird flu checkpoints around the sprawling metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City, officials said on Friday, as the killer virus claimed another victim, raising the country’s recent death toll to 10. Following an order from the city’s People’s Committee, the gun-toting riot officers are backing up traffic police and market monitors manning 24-hour checkpoints thrown up to stop infected or uncertified birds entering the southern city, officials said.

As Vietnam’s third wave of the killer H5N1 virus spreads unchecked, city authorities have started destroying any chickens and ducks whose origins cannot be pinned down, a policy that has raised the rare threat of civil unrest. Most of the victims are believed to have caught the virus from infected poultry but doctors fear it could mutate into a form that is easily passed between people, unleashing a global human flu pandemic that could kill millions. The Saigon Giai Phong daily said travel agents in Vietnam’s southern commercial hub had also been told not to take tourists to areas with a high risk of the H5N1 virus, which has now killed at least 42 people since first erupting in Asia at the end of 2003.

Vietnam’s latest victim was a 32-year-old man from Phu Tho province, 210 km (130 miles) northwest of Hanoi, who died on Thursday afternoon, according to a doctor at Hanoi’s National Institute for Clinical Research of Tropical Medicine. Two other men were being treated there after laboratory tests confirmed they had bird flu, the doctor said.

A researcher at Ho Chi Minh City’s Pasteur Institute said tests had also confirmed the virus had infected two girls, a 10-year-old from Long An province and a 13-year-old from Dong Thap province. “We tested the 13-year-old girl three times and found the H5 component in her samples,” said the laboratory researcher. Her mother died on Jan. 21, also from the H5N1 virus, doctors said. The new cases bring Vietnam’s total number of human infections to 16 in the latest wave of the virus, which started in late 2004. Of these infections, 10 have died in recent weeks.

Asia’s total death toll from this outbreak now stands at 42, including 12 who died of bird flu in Thailand last year as well as victims in the previous recent Vietnamese outbreaks.

Reuters - January 28, 2005