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Repeat of bird flu outbreak poss
HANOI (AP)--Health experts are bracing for a repeat of last year's bird flu outbreak after the deaths of six people in Vietnam thus far in January.
Outbreaks among poultry have been reported nationwide in Vietnam, and health experts say the pattern looks eerily similar to this time last year when the virus spread rapidly just before the popular Lunar New Year holiday, or Tet. It quickly emerged in nine other Asian countries, killing or forcing the culls of about 100 million birds and jumping from poultry to people in Vietnam and Thailand, where 26 and 12 deaths have occurred, respectively.
"It has a higher fatality rate than the Ebola virus," said Hans Troedsson, WHO representative in Vietnam, where more than 70 percent of those infected have died.
"Since Tet is a time when people are traveling and more poultry is going to the market, more poultry is being slaughtered, and poultry is more consumed and transported, there is, of course, a high risk of the spread of the virus and infection," he said of the holiday that starts Feb. 9.
The WHO and other health experts have expressed concern that avian influenza could evolve into the next global pandemic--killing millions worldwide--if the virus eventually mutates and human-to-human transmission occurs. There is, however, no evidence of that occurring.
The health agency has also issued guidance on its website cautioning against transporting poultry from places affected by the bird flu into areas hit by last month's tsunami that killed as many as 220,000 people--though numbers have varied drastically--and left thousands homeless. It stressed that infected poultry must be "kept out of the food chain, including emergency food relief activities."
But Klaus Stohr, the WHO's influenza chief in Geneva, has said areas affected by the disaster have not experienced previous bird flu outbreaks and that the tsunami itself doesn't create a greater risk for a flu pandemic to emerge.
On Jan. 29, an 18-year-old woman became the sixth person to die of bird flu in Vietnam since Dec. 30, after eating an infected chicken, officials said. No one else in her family, including her sister who slaughtered the bird, showed any sign of the disease.
Vietnam has banned the import of poultry from neighboring countries and 200,000 pamphlets have been distributed in Ho Chi Minh City advising people to avoid eating birds and coming into contact with them.
The communist government in Hanoi has placed the country on alert and urged greater caution, but the domestic sale and transport of poultry hasn't been banned in Vietnam as it was last year during the Tet holiday. About 300,000 birds have died or been culled so far this year, compared with about 1 million a day at the peak of last year's outbreak.
"The reemergence of outbreaks so far this year hasn't been as ravaging as last year but we have heightened our vigilance and are prepared for the worst," said Dau Ngoc Hao, deputy director of the Veterinary Department in Hanoi.
Chicken is the centerpiece of Vietnamese meals during the New Year's festivities and is traditionally used as an offering to the family's ancestors in even the poorest households.
"I eat it and I will continue to eat it during Tet," said Nguyen Van Phuong, carrying two live ducks out of Hanoi's largest poultry market. "I'm worried about my life, but I'm reassured all the poultry here is healthy."
Date: 1/24/05
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