Vietnamese boy dies from bird flu
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http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/416483/1/.html
Posted:
20 March 2009 0151 hrs
The national institute of infectious and tropical
diseases in Hanoi, Vietnam
HANOI: A three-year-old Vietnamese boy died on
Thursday from bird flu, a doctor in southern Ho Chi Minh City said, becoming the
country's third human victim of the disease this year.
Tran Cong Phuc
was admitted to the city's Tropical Diseases Institute on Monday where he tested
positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus.
His
condition worsened on Thursday morning and he died in the afternoon, said the
director of the institute, Nguyen Tran Chinh.
Communist Vietnam has the
world's second-highest bird flu death toll after Indonesia, with 55 deaths.
Phuc's family raised chickens in the Mekong delta province of Dong Thap
and local doctor Nguyen Thi Thu Huong said some of the birds had died earlier
this month.
"His parents cooked soup with the meat from the dead
chickens for the boy to eat," Huong said, adding the boy's parents also ate
chicken but showed no sign of illness.
"We are doing quarantine and
cleansing the area around the boy's house," Huong said.
A doctor from
the municipal Pasteur Institute said before the boy's death that his sample
would be tested again to confirm the infection.
The H5N1 virus typically
spreads from birds to humans via direct contact, but experts fear it could
mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, with the potential to
kill millions in a pandemic.
Tran was the third person to have died from
the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Vietnam this year, according to official figures.
The two other had both slaughtered and eaten sick poultry before they
died, Vietnam News Agency cited the Health Ministry?s Preventive Medicine and
Environment Department as saying.
The World Health Organisation (WHO)
and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said last month that
Vietnam had to monitor the bird flu situation closely to prevent more deaths.
"The message is: stay aware the virus is still out there and we must not
be complacent," Shelaye Boothey, WHO spokeswoman in Hanoi, said prior to the
latest death.
According to the WHO, H5N1 has killed more than 250 people
across the world since 2003.
Vietnam's agriculture ministry has said the
risks associated with avian flu are "significant," and that the public
"generally does nothing to protect itself" against the threat.
Vietnam's
capital Hanoi in February lifted a ban on the transportation of livestock by
motorbike and bicycle, media reports have said, barely a week after it was
introduced to help prevent the spread of diseases like H5N1.
Despite the
ban, animals destined for slaughter continued to be transported in Hanoi on
motorbikes and bicycles, a popular means of transport for poultry, pigs and even
dogs in Vietnam.
The country managed to contain the H5N1 virus in 2006,
but in 2007 recorded new cases of human infection and deaths. Last year there
were five deaths from the virus, all in the first three months.
Medclinician