Vietnam Moves to Curb Bird Flu

Vietnamese authorities Wednesday ordered the slaughter or culling of all domesticated ducks in Ho Chi Minh City to stem surging bird flu outbreaks that have killed 13 people since late December.

Vietnam’s Health Ministry on Tuesday had confirmed that a Cambodian woman who died Sunday had bird flu, marking the first confirmed Cambodian death from the disease and indicating its possible spread. All the other fatalities since December have been Vietnamese nationals.

The 25-year-old woman was from Kampot province in Cambodia, where she developed symptoms Jan. 21. She sought treatment in Vietnam and died in the Kien Giang provincial hospital.

Influenza experts said the limited culling being undertaken in Ho Chi Minh City probably was a case of too little, too late because the virus had already spread through most of the region.

“These measures are really nonsense,” Dutch virologist Jan de Jong of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, one of the leading experts on the virus, said in a telephone interview.

In recent months, authorities in Thailand and Vietnam have culled only in areas immediately around outbreaks, with minimal success.

Last year, a far larger culling -- about 100 million birds across the region -- also proved ineffective, partly because the virus had become endemic in wild bird populations that infect farms.

De Jong suggested that a near-total culling of the region’s poultry and curtailment of poultry farming for several years would be the only ways to stop the outbreaks.

But he acknowledged that his recommended steps would pose a terrible dilemma for nations trying to protect residents while limiting economic damage from the virus.

“People are looking for new ideas,” said Scott Dowell, a Thailand-based infectious-disease expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The avian influenza virus, known as H5N1, was first detected in 1997 in Hong Kong. Despite slaughter of infected flocks, the virus has continued to spread in parts of Southeast Asia.

Infectious-disease experts fear that as more people contract the illness, the virus will mutate and become more easily passed between humans, setting the stage for a pandemic.