Vietnam boy tests positive for bird flu: doctors
A three-year-old boy in Vietnam has tested positive for potentially deadly bird flu, doctors said Thursday.
The patient from the Mekong delta province of Dong Thap was admitted to HCM City’s Tropical Diseases Institute Monday and on Wednesday a test came back positive for the virus’s H5N1 strain, said Nguyen Van Chau, director of the city’s health care department.
“The situation of the boy is getting worse,” Chau told AFP.
A poster warns people about bird flu in Ho Chi Minh City in late February. A three-year-old boy in Vietnam has tested positive for the potentially deadly virus, doctors have said.
(AFP/File/Hoang Dinh Nam)
Another doctor, from the municipal Pasteur Institute, said the boy’s sample will be tested again to confirm the infection.
Communist Vietnam has the world’s second-highest bird flu death toll after Indonesia, with 54 deaths.
Since the beginning of the year, the deaths of two people have been blamed on the virus and the three-year-old boy is the fourth infection reported this year.
Poultry in five of Vietnam’s 63 provinces are infected with the H5N1 strain, the animal health department says.
According to the World Health Organisation, H5N1 has killed more than 250 people across the world since 2003.
The H5N1 virus typically spreads from birds to humans via direct contact, but experts fear that it could mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, with the potential to kill millions in a pandemic.
Category: Health