Vietnam takes steps to head off flu pandemic
(NPR)
Updated: 2005-11-04 09:14

Experts have dreaded the next flu pandemic for years. But only in the past month have most people focused on the frightening possibilities: Hundreds of millions sick; dire shortages of medicine and hospital beds; millions dead; and little prospect of a vaccine in time for an expected second wave of deadly flu.

In a vaccination station set up in a parking lot in Ha Tay Province, veterinary technician Luong Van Tien inoculates a baby chick. Vietnamese officials are trying to vaccinate all chickens and ducks against H5N1 bird flu by the end of this year. [NPR]

It's a picture not too different from 1918, when a new strain of flu quickly spread to every corner of the planet. Then, something like 40 million people died.

But there is one big difference. This time public health officials have the luxury -- and the curse -- of foresight. They see clear signs of an impending flu pandemic. That means they can plan and prepare, if they can figure out what to do.

Ground Zero for a Pandemic

Experts in human and animal health say Vietnam is the perfect incubator for the next pandemic. That's mainly because the Vietnamese have intense, daily contact with poultry -- in traffic-clogged cities, remote villages and everywhere in between.

In Hanoi, Dr. Marie Sweeney takes us on a tour one of the city's many open-air markets. She's the health attache at the U.S. embassy here.

"Not only do you have live poultry, you have freshly killed dressed poultry," she says. "People can buy the whole bird, buy the gizzards and the liver; you can buy chicken feet."

When Sweeney looks out over the hundreds of birds for sale here, she sees things most people don't: billions of viruses. Or at least she sees the perfect opportunity for flu viruses to flourish, mutate and spread.

She watches as one butcher cuts the throat of a chicken and drains its blood into a bowl. "She's doing this without any protective equipment," Sweeney notes. "No gloves on her hands. Nothing on her face. No mask."

Nguyen Thi Duyen, the poultry butcher, is 24. She's been slaughtering and plucking birds since she was 14. So she knows about "chicken flu," or "cum ga," as the Vietnamese call it.

"I have heard of the bird flu but there haven't been any cases here," she says. "There were chicken deaths, but not because of the bird flu."

Through a translator, Duyen says she's worried about the disease. "But I work on the chickens that are still alive. If they're already dead, I won't work on them. I'll take them to the market. I won't work on dead chickens."

That won't necessarily protect her. Vietnamese ducks are often infected with the bird flu virus without showing symptoms. And now studies show chickens can be silently infected, too.

Page:

1

2

3

4