June 20, 2005

New bird flu outbreak in southern Vietnam

According to the Vietnamese government, 700 chickens on a farm in Ben Tre province were culled after 6,000 of them had died within four days. Samples tested positive for the bird flu strain H5N1 and a number of human-to-human cases of H5N1 had also been reported.

This recent outbreak reportedly coincides with an outbreak of H5N1 in humans in central and northern Vietnam. While the northern cases were transmissions of a milder, more transmittable form of bird flu in humans, those in southern Vietnam and Cambodia have almost all been lethal.