Vietnam to set up bird flu hospital for Cambodians
HANOI - Vietnam, where bird flu has killed 42 people, will build a hospital ward for Cambodian victims near the border between the two countries in an effort to contain risks of the virus spreading, officials said on Friday.
The 10-bed ward would be built at a hospital in Kien Luong district, 30 km from the border with impoverished Cambodia in the southern province of Kien Giang, health officials said.
"If there is any patient coming over from Cambodia, they can be treated there, instead of going further into Vietnam," Dinh Cong Than, head of Kien Giang's Preventive Medicine Department, told Reuters.
The Cambodian health system is rudimentary at best and early this year two Cambodian women infected by bird flu were taken to a hospital 90 km inside Vietnam, where they died.
Experts fear that the lack of effective monitoring systems in poor countries like Cambodia, which is still recovering from the Khmer Rouge genocide, could mean big outbreaks going undetected and raise the chances of a human bird flu pandemic.
At least 64 people have died of bird flu since it arrived in the region in late 2003 and the virus is endemic in several countries.
Although the H5N1 virus cannot now move easily between people, experts fear it could mutate into one which can and set off a pandemic in which millions might die.
The Vietnamese government is deep into a major battle against bird flu, but more outbreaks are being reported as the country moves into its winter, when the virus appears to thrive best.
Outbreaks were declared on Thursday in the northern province of Hai Duong, where more than 3,300 birds died or were culled, the state-run Nhan Dan (People) newspaper said.
Hai Duong was the seventh of Vietnam's 64 provinces to have been hit in the latest wave of outbreaks which began in early October.
Nhan Dan also said 1,400 chickens were slaughtered in the central province of Quang Ngai after more than 100 died on the same farm on Thursday.
Reuters - November 11, 2005.
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