 |
||
|
Bird flu
spreads to more provinces in Vietnam |
||
|
HANOI, Fri. --- Bird flu has spread to more than a quarter of Vietnam’s 64 provinces and cities since early last month, officials said today, with the cooler north the worst-hit region. Outbreaks were reported in three more northern provinces, taking the total number to 17 provinces. Thirteen of the provinces, including Hanoi, are in northern Vietnam, a senior Agriculture Ministry official said. “The bird flu situation is more worrying in the north, where the current winter weather favors the growth of the H5N1 virus”, the ministry’s animal health department deputy director Hoang Van Nam said. |
While drastic measures have been taken in Hanoi, such as closing down poultry markets and carrying out mass culls of fowl, outbreaks have spread in several surrounding provinces, Nam said. Astrid Tripodi, the Food and Agricultural Organization’s avian influenza coordinator in Hanoi, cautioned against blaming the weather alone, saying, “there may be other factors that have to be looked at”. “With the cold weather the lifetime of the virus is improved”. “That can be one of the explanations”, Tripodi said. |
Another Ministry official blamed poor supervision on the part of provincial health authorities for the outbreaks. “The absence of coordinated preventive measures as well as lethargy on the part of localities, which failed to discover new outbreaks in time, is leading to the fast spread of bird flu”, said the official. Hanoi is meanwhile getting ready to stage a major exercise in the capital next week to test the preparedness of hospitals to deal with a large number of human bird flu cases. --- AFP. |
|
|
||
