Three-year-old dies from bird flu

Three-year-old dies from bird flu

A poster warns people about bird flu in Ho Chi Minh City in late February. A three-year-old boy from the Mekong Delta Province of Dong Thap died Thursday after testing positive for bird flu on Wednesday.

Tran Cong Phuc, the country’s third human victim of this disease this year, was admitted to the city's Tropical Diseases Institute on Monday where he tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus. His condition worsened on Thursday morning and he died in the afternoon, said the director of the institute, Nguyen Tran Chinh. According to local online newswire VietnamNet, the boy had been on a respirator. Phuc's family raised chickens in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap and local doctor Nguyen Thi Thu Huong said some of the birds had died earlier this month. A local doctor told Thanh Nien the boy’s family members said he had not eaten any poultry recently. But the doctor said he might have been in contact with the animals while playing. However, doctor Huong told AFP that “his parents cooked soup with the meat from the dead chickens for the boy to eat.” She added that the boy's parents also ate chicken but showed no signs of illness, according to AFP. A doctor from the municipal Pasteur Institute said before the boy's death that his sample would be tested again to confirm the infection. Tran was the third person to have died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Vietnam this year, according to official figures. The two others had both slaughtered and eaten sick poultry before they died, Vietnam News Agency cited the Health Ministry's Preventive Medicine and Environment Department as saying. The three-year-old Mekong Delta boy was the fourth human infection reported this year and so far the youngest patient. Also Thursday, another adult patient from Dong Thap was transferred to the Tropical Diseases Institute displaying the same symptoms. Five of Vietnam's 63 provinces are currently battling bird flu outbreaks, according to the Animal Health Department. The H5N1 virus typically spreads from birds to humans via direct contact, but experts fear it could mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, with the potential to kill millions in a pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said last month that Vietnam should monitor the bird flu situation closely to prevent more deaths. “The message is: stay aware the virus is still out there and we must not be complacent,” Shelaye Boothey, WHO spokeswoman in Hanoi, said prior to the latest death. According to the WHO, H5N1 has killed more than 250 people across the world since 2003. Vietnam has the world's second-highest bird flu death toll after Indonesia, with 55 deaths.