Vietnam family of five catches bird flu
Vietnam health officials said today that five members of a family that ran a chicken farm in northern Vietnam have tested positive for bird flu.
Initial tests showed the H5N1 virus was present in samples taken from a 35-year-old man, his 32-year-old wife and their three daughters, aged 10 years, four years, and four months, said Nguyen Van Vy, director of Haiphong Health Department.
The family, admitted to Viet Tiep Hospital on March 22 with flu symptoms, had raised more than 400 chickens. About half of the poultry began dying at the beginning of the month and the family then ate some of the chickens, he said.
Though doctors can’t completely rule out human to human transmission, they believe the family contracted the illness through direct contact with the sick birds, said Nguyen Tran Hien, director of the Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology. Hien said final results on the tests were still pending.
“I’m not very worried (about human-to-human transmission) because they all got sick at the same time so it’s more likely that they got infected from the same source,” he said.
Overall, 48 people in the region have been killed by the deadly virus, which first emerged on poultry farms in December 2003. The disease has killed two people from neighbouring Cambodia, and 12 in Thailand. The remainder died in Vietnam, including 14 in the latest wave that began in late December 2004.
Health experts have warned that the bird flu virus could mutate, increasing the risk of human-to-human transmission, which could spark a pandemic. However, there has been no evidence of that so far, with most cases traced back to contact with sick birds.
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