Word: birding
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...rapidly and died on Jan. 9. The next day, his younger brother Nguyen Thanh Hung, who had taken care of Viet in the hospital, became ill. When Thanh Hung's blood test came back positive for H5N1, doctors retested Viet's blood and found that he'd also had bird flu. "The whole family was paralyzed," says Thanh Hung, who has recovered from the disease. "Everyone was stunned...
...were health authorities, who initially feared that the Nguyen family cluster meant the H5N1 virus?which usually only spreads from bird to human in isolated cases?might now be moving from person to person. Since the disease first began jumping from birds to people in 1997, scientists have been worried that the lethal virus could mutate to gain the ability to transmit from one person to another as easily as a normal human-flu virus. That would open the door for a global influenza pandemic that could kill millions...
...farther, as a pandemic-causing virus likely would. (A recent New England Journal of Medicine article confirmed that such limited human-to-human transmissions occurred last September in Thailand.) But the threat of a pandemic hasn't diminished: as of last Friday, Vietnam has reported 15 human cases of bird flu since mid-December, 11 of whom have already died. The virus has spread to poultry populations in almost half of the country's 64 provinces. Most worrisome of all, the increased poultry sales and mass travel that mark the coming Tet Lunar New Year festival (beginning...
...good news is that Vietnamese authorities, who badly mismanaged past outbreaks, are doing far more to ensure that the Year of the Rooster doesn't become the Year of Bird Flu. The southern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City has closed its unhygienic wet markets, which sold live chickens and ducks, forcing all incoming poultry to be killed at slaughterhouses. Market monitors, backed by riot police, are manning checkpoints on major highways to ensure that all incoming poultry have "passports" proving that they've been inspected by government veterinarians for avian flu. Since December, 800,000 birds have been culled...
...Vietnam's traditional poultry practices are dangerous because dense populations of people and birds mingle at virtually every step of production, from chick to ph? pot. With the virus embedded in the local duck and chicken population, repeated human-bird contact means "it's inevitable you'll get human infection," says Webster. Vietnam is trying to halt such infections by modernizing its poultry industry, limiting human-bird contact, but that won't be easy. More than 80% of its poultry producers are small-scale farmers who raise a few dozen birds to eat or sell?and few keep their flocks...