Vietnam deploys bird flu riot police

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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. 

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