Bird flu kills 4-year-old boy in Vietnam

Dec 27, 2007, 18:20 GMT

Hanoi - Vietnam confirmed Thursday that bird flu has killed a 4-year-old boy from a northern province, the first human case in the country in more than four months, an official said.

The boy died at the Pediatrics Hospital in Hanoi on December 16, five days after he was admitted to a hospital in Son La province, 320 kilometers north-west of Hanoi, according to Nguyen Huy Nga, director of the Preventive Medicine Department under the Ministry of Health.

The boy was transferred to the hospital in Hanoi on December 14 after his symptoms were identified similar to bird flu. Blood tests confirmed the presence of the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.

'The boy and his family had eaten sick chicken before, but none of any other members of the family has fallen sick since,' Nga said.

Son La province has not reported any new bird flu outbreak in poultry recently, but Nga insisted that the boy got avian influenza from birds.

'We are afraid that H5N1 is already there among poultry in the province and may spread widely in this cold weather,' Nga said.

The case was the first confirmed death from bird flu in Vietnam since August and the fifth of 2007.

Vietnam at one time had the highest number of deaths from the H5N1 virus, a disease that primarily affects poultry and wild birds but can infect humans with close contact to sick birds.

The latest death brings the toll from avian influenza in Vietnam to 47 since bird flu was first detected in the country in 2003.

While only about 210 human deaths have been reported worldwide, scientists fear that the virus could mutate into a new human influenza strain, touching off a pandemic with the potential to kill millions.

Vietnam's aggressive campaign of vaccinating domestic poultry has been credited with reducing the number of poultry outbreaks and human cases.

The country has now completed the second vaccination round of the year on more than 156 million birds, including 90 million chickens and 66 million ducks.

Nevertheless, isolated poultry outbreaks still occur in some Vietnamese provinces. Four communes in the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh are reported to have bid flu outbreaks.