Vietnam fights bird flu threat as boy dies

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Bird flu has killed a 9-year-old boy in Vietnam, a health official said on Wednesday, marking the first reported death in 2005 from a virus that killed more than 30 people last year and ravaged the poultry industry as it swept across Asia.

The death comes a week after the World Health Organisation warned Vietnam may face new bird flu outbreaks this month, as poultry is transported around the country ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations in early February.

In response to the threat, Vietnam has culled 4,000 poultry so far this year and officials in Ho Chi Minh City had tightened inspection, state-run Voice of Vietnam radio said.

The latest cull brought to 24,000 the number of poultry slaughtered since early December across eight provinces, six of them in the Mekong Delta, where the epidemic broke out in late 2003 before spreading across the country and wiping out 17 percent of Vietnam’s poultry stock.

Preliminary tests by health officials from Ho Chi Minh City showed the H5N1 bird flu virus killed the boy on Tuesday night in the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh, said Luong Van Minh, deputy director of the provincial hospital.

Further tests were being conducted, he added. Tra Vinh is one of the eight provinces that reported the recurrence of bird flu.

The boy was the country’s 30th bird flu patient, and the 21st to die. Bird flu also caused 12 deaths in Thailand last year, and cases were reported across Southeast Asia and China.

Minh said the latest victim was admitted to the hospital at the weekend along with a 14-year-old boy, who has since been transferred to a Ho Chi Minh City hospital.

Both children were suspected to have contracted bird flu, but sample tests of the 14-year-old, who remains in hospital, showed he was not infected, doctors said.

A 16-year-old Vietnamese girl infected in late December remained in a critical condition in the Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the hospital’s deputy director, Tran Tinh Hien, told Reuters.

On Jan. 1, animal health officials launched a campaign to target poultry shipments to Ho Chi Minh City, home to nearly 10 million people, the Vietnam News daily said on Wednesday.

It said authorities had banned the transport of live poultry on passenger buses. Inspectors had also seized unsafe fresh and processed chicken during the campaign, it said.

Vietnam’s health ministry said on its Web site ( http://www.moh.gov.vn ) that the H5N1 virus was lethal and contagious, and can quickly mutate and combine with another flu virus to kill people.

“Humankind has never had contact with this hybrid virus before, so there is no immune mechanism,” the ministry said in an online guide to the disease. 

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