Word: vietnamize
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Nguyen Huu Viet must have thought the worst was over when he buried his two-year-old son on Dec. 25. The boy had drowned two days before in a fishpond near their home in northern Vietnam's Thai Binh province, and Viet was undone by the death. At the funeral the family served raw duck blood and porridge?rural comfort food. Although they had heard that the avian influenza that swept Southeast Asia last year had returned, they thought the disease was confined to the south. The day after the funeral, Viet fell sick with flulike symptoms...
...within the family, it hasn't spread 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...
...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 in the ongoing effort to eradicate the outbreak; 40 million of Vietnam's 258 million total poultry population have been culled since the disease first emerged in late 2003. "They're definitely responding much better than this time last year," says Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani, an avian-flu expert based at the WHO's Western Pacific regional office...
...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...
...Given enough time, Vietnam should be able to tighten control over its poultry trade. The trouble is, bird flu may not wait that long. The disease is already endemic in much of Asia, and a recent WHO report showed that the H5N1 virus has become progressively hardier and more lethal, with a human mortality rate of 75%. Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, says he's shocked by the virulence of avian flu in the patients he has helped treat: "I've never experienced...