Word: vietnamize
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...last year, China and the North acted to reduce the outflow. The crackdown apparently began after 468 asylum seekers who had holed up in Vietnam were airlifted to Seoul. North Korea broke off talks with officials from the South, tightened its border controls and increased executions of those accused of people smuggling, according to NKNet, a Seoul-based NGO. China has also beefed up its border patrols, according to refugees. Last October, the Chinese government was operating half a dozen detention facilities inside military bases near the frontier and was repatriating up to 300 North Koreans every week, according...
...months of this year, a drop of almost 40% from the same period in 2004, according to activists (Seoul stopped releasing statistics on refugees earlier this year, citing security concerns). But tighter border controls aren't the only reason fewer North Koreans are getting out. Since the airlift from Vietnam, South Korean officials have publicly discouraged organized efforts to help North Koreans leave. Seoul has also tightened screening of asylum seekers and reduced cash settlements for newly arrived defectors from $36,000 to $20,000, money that many used to rescue relatives stuck in North Korea and China. "The government...
...race to develop a vaccine for bird flu, Vietnam has been a dark horse with early success. Vietnamese scientists have produced a prototype vaccine for the H5N1 avian-influenza strain and are planning human testing in August?just a few months behind top researchers in the U.S. There's good reason for the haste: 70% of the world's bird-flu deaths in the last two years occurred in Vietnam, and the government worries that the country could someday be ground zero of a pandemic if the flu mutates to become easily transferred among humans...
...World Health Organization (WHO) and other scientists are worried about Vietnam's vaccine, which they say could itself make people sick, or even set off a pandemic. The problem is that the virus reference seed?the weakened bit of live H5N1 used to build up immunity in the human body?was mixed with cancer cells to help it replicate and then grown in a monkey kidney. That method is highly unorthodox. "People could get cancer from the vaccine," says Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's global influenza program. Even more ominous, the developers say they've followed international procedures...
...officials thought they had convinced Vietnam's government to call off human testing on its vaccine and develop a new one based on an approved virus seed provided by the WHO. But two top Vietnamese scientists tell TIME they will forge ahead with their own strain. "Nothing has changed," says Dr. Nguyen Thu Van, the head of the vaccine team. "We will test our vaccine on humans as planned before." There's little anyone can do: the WHO has no enforcement powers. "The danger is very unlikely," admits Michael Perdue, a WHO virus expert who has consulted with Vietnam...