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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]](xin_38110204092744414881.jpg)
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.
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