Many of the villages where we work, hold chickens as sacred beings...they have the run of the house.
Battling bird flu, Vietnam bans transport of chickens
Vietnam has banned the transport of chickens within 18 southern provinces as it tries to contain a bird flu outbreak that has killed at least three people and nearly two million poultry.
The Agriculture Ministry said late on Wednesday no chickens could be moved in or out of the provinces, where the outbreak is first thought to have occurred late last year.
A total of 12 people in northern Vietnam have died from influenza, but only three have been confirmed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to have contracted bird flu. It is unclear how the three caught the virus.
Vietnam has said there are five more suspected human cases of bird flu, which experts say could be more devastating than last year's SARS virus if it combines with a human influenza virus.
The WHO, which has sent two experts to the Southeast Asian country for consultations, said a vaccine to fight the outbreak would arrive in the next few weeks at the earliest. Vietnam lacks the expertise and equipment to fight the disease.
The outbreak comes just weeks before Tet, the Lunar New Year holiday that is Vietnam's biggest festival and which features chicken as a major dish.
It is still unclear if the virus can be transmitted by human-to-human contact, Thursday's official Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper quoted professor Hoang Thuy Long, director of the Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, as saying.
Doctors said three of the five suspected cases were relatives of a patient who had died with influenza symptoms.
"As we are not able to define if the H5N1 flu virus could jump from humans to humans, the fight against this flu has yet to have a clear target," Long was quoted as saying. "It is expected that the avian influenza strain A (H5N1) would linger."
Long, in an interview with the official Vietnam News Agency, also said the avian influenza strain A could infect ducks, chickens, pigs, horses and humans.
"In a case when a pig is infected by both the poultry virus and the human (flu) virus, this host will create a new virus which has most of the human genes and either one protein H, one protein N or both of them from the poultry virus," he said.
The outer surface of the influenza virus contains two glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (H), which has 15 sub-types, and the neuraminidase (N) with nine sub-types.
Long said the newly created virus would therefore be more dangerous and that the human body might be unable to fight off the invading virus. He could not be reached on Thursday for further comment.
Japan as well as South Korea have also reported major outbreaks of bird flu that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of poultry being culled.
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