Vietnam bird flu death toll rises to 35 - UPDATE 2

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A 17-year-old woman became Vietnam’s 35th bird flu victim on Friday, although tests on a third Cambodian suspected of contracting the virus, which has now killed 49 people since 2003, proved negative.

The teenager, who died on March 23, according to hospital emergency unit head Nguyen Hong Ha, was from Nam Dinh province, 90 km (56 miles) south of Hanoi.

A 40-year-old Vietnamese woman from Quang Ninh, along the Chinese border, was also confirmed as having the highly lethal H5N1 virus, which doctors fear could mutate into a more contagious form and unleash a global pandemic of killer flu.

Provincial health officials said neither patient lived in an area where bird flu outbreaks had occurred.

H5N1, which has also claimed 12 Thais and two Cambodians, has killed about 70 percent of the people known to have been infected, but it does not pass easily from birds to humans.

Cambodia’s Health Ministry and the World Health Organization said test results on an 18-year-old bird flu suspect in the southern province of Kampot, home to both previous cases, had proved negative.

In Vietnam, the afternoon edition of the state-run Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi) daily said five members of one family were hospitalised on Wednesday in the northern port city of Haiphong with coughing and breathing difficulties.

Doctors suspected they had bird flu, the paper said. It quoted Nguyen Van Vy, director of Haiphong’s Health Department, as saying poultry at the family’s house had been slaughtered earlier to stop bird flu outbreaks.

Bird flu tests on the five were under way, Vy said.

Before the latest death, the WHO put Vietnam’s official death toll at 33, but this did not include a boy Vietnamese doctors said died of encephalitis, but who was later found also to have had bird flu. 

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