Vietnam Expands Poultry Ban to Curb Spread of Bird Flu

Vietnamese officials Wednesday ordered all chickens be slaughtered or removed from Ho Chi Minh City and banned the raising of poultry there through this year in an effort to quell the latest outbreak of bird flu.

Authorities previously banned live ducks and geese within the city because waterfowl can be infected with the bird flu virus without showing symptoms. A nationwide ban on the raising of waterfowl through June 30 was also put in place.

The ban on poultry is an attempt to keep Vietnam’s commercial capital safe and augment the so-far uneven efforts to stamp out the disease nationally. The virus has killed 13 people in Vietnam since December.

No human cases have been reported in the country for more than two weeks, and seven of 35 affected provinces or cities have seen no new cases among birds for three weeks. But five of those provinces announced new poultry infections Sunday.

Michael Osterholm, a bird flu expert at the University of Minnesota, said banning live poultry within Ho Chi Minh City was of dubious value.

Birds “are either smuggled back in or never killed to begin with,” he said.

Osterholm said the government must get tougher -- restricting poultry farming to only secure areas and enforcing strict sanitary controls on workers and vehicles that enter those areas.

The avian influenza virus, formally known as H5N1, devastated much of the poultry industry in Southeast Asia last year. Since December, it has reemerged in more than half of Vietnam’s provinces, as well as in Thailand and Cambodia.

About 1.5 million birds have been killed in Vietnam to prevent the spread of the disease.

A study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that bird flu symptoms in humans may be more varied and difficult to pinpoint than previously thought.

The study detailed a Vietnamese case last year involving none of the typical coughing and breathing problems associated with bird flu. The 4-year-old boy seemed to have encephalitis, a brain inflammation characterized by high fever and vomiting, followed by coma and, often, death. After he died, the H5N1 virus was found in his spinal fluid.

“It suggests that the spectrum of disease is broader than we thought,” flu researcher Jeremy Farrar, coauthor of the study, said during a telephone interview from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City.

Health experts worry that the virus, which kills about 70% of people infected, could mutate into a form that easily passes between people, leading to the possibility of a worldwide epidemic.