Hanoi - Bird flu has spread to poultry in two more provinces in Vietnam, the country's Animal Health Department confirmed Thursday, raising to 12 the number of provinces where outbreaks have been discovered since the beginning of May. Officials in the provinces of Ha Nam and Vinh Phuc reported cases of H5N1, the strain of the virus that has been deadly in humans, in local birds on Wednesday.
The spring outbreaks have surprised some farmers, who had come to expect avian influenza to spread in the winter, as it mainly has since it first surfaced in Vietnam in late 2003.
"The possibility that the outbreaks will continue to spread further is very high, even though the weather is hot right now," said Hoang Van Nam, deputy head of Animal Health Department.
More than 7,000 ducks and chickens had died of the disease in Ha Nam and Vinh Phuc provinces, forcing authorities to cull 49,000 other birds in the infected zones, he said.
Vietnam has carried out mass poultry vaccination campaigns every autumn and spring since 2004 and has taken other steps, such as closing down wet markets and restricting the breeding of ducks, to prevent the spread of bird flu. The country's fight against the H5N1 virus has been widely viewed as a success story, particularly in having eliminated the spread of the disease to humans after suffering 93 cases and 42 deaths from 2003 to 2005.
However, the country on Friday reported its first new human infection since 2005 when a man who had recently slaughtered chickens was diagnosed with H5N1 at a Hanoi hospital.
Jeff Gilbert, an H5N1 expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Hanoi office, said there were signs that the fight against bird flu had lost steam at the local level this year.
"There's been kind of a fatigue with things," Gilbert said. "The farmers in the fields might not be so active to vaccinate the poultry."
The Animal Health Department reported that so far this year, 39 of the country's 64 provinces have completed their first round of poultry vaccinations, injecting more than 124 million birds. Each bird must be vaccinated twice.
Gilbert said government statistics indicated that in some cases, initial vaccinations had not been followed quickly enough by second vaccinations. But he said national officials were acting aggressively to push local officials to reinvigorate their avian flu control efforts.
In a message sent Wednesday to officials in each of Vietnam's provinces, the country's agriculture minister blamed the outbreaks on a failure to vaccinate enough ducks and chickens this year. He called on the officials to ensure that 100 per cent of the ducks in their provinces are inoculated against the virus.
Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in Hanoi, said last week's occurrence of a human case was not unexpected.
"We know that the virus has been circulating in the environment all the time," Troedsson said. "As one, isolated case, it's not a surprise, and not alarming either."
Troedsson expressed confidence in the authorities' efforts to intensify vaccination campaigns, but he said he was concerned by the fact that the flocks of ducks that experienced the recent outbreak had not been vaccinated.
Gilbert said that in the long run, Vietnam might need to shift away from mass vaccination campaigns twice a year and toward strategies more targeted at specific outbreaks. He said biannual campaigns to inoculate every bird in the country were not sustainable.
H5N1 has spread around the world since breaking out in South-East Asia in late 2003. It mainly infects birds and humans who come into close contact with them, but scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that is easily transmissible among humans, sparking a global pandemic that could kill millions.
