# 1026
Overnight the wire services carried reports of a Vietnamese woman, 7 months pregnant, hospitalized with bird flu. These reports had her on a respirator, and in critical condition. This from Xinhua News.
Vietnam reports new human bird flu case
www.chinaview.cn
2007-07-31 10:21:15
HANOI, July 31 (Xinhua) -- A 22-year-old woman from Vietnam's northern Ha Tay province was diagnosed to have contracted bird flu virus strain H5N1, local newspaper Saigon Liberation reported Tuesday.
The farmer from the province's Thanh Oai district, who has respiratory illness and needs respiratory assistance, is being treated in Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, the newspaper quoted sources from the Vietnamese Health Ministry as saying.
Now, a few hours later, it is being reported that she has died. What is interesting is that these reports indicate she died on Saturday.
Pregnant Vietnamese woman dies of bird flu
Tue 31 Jul 2007, 8:15 GMT
By Ho Binh Minh
HANOI (Reuters) - A Vietnamese woman who was seven months pregnant has died of bird flu, the country's third human death from the virus this year, doctors said on Tuesday.
"She died on Saturday," said Doctor Tran Thuy Hanh, chief of the Bach Mai hospital where the 22-year-old woman was taken last week from a farm in the northern province of Ha Tay, the largest poultry supplier to Hanoi.
Hanh gave no further details of the woman, who had been confirmed to have contracted the H5N1 virus by laboratory tests in Vietnam.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has not confirmed she had bird flu, which killed a 28-year-old woman from northern Vietnam last month.
A doctor in Ha Tay province said there were no bird flu outbreaks in the area where the latest victim lived.
"It made us difficult to pin down how she became infected," he said. "Earlier she bought a chicken leg of unknown origin for a meal in the family but nobody else got sick."
Ten people who came into contact with the woman have been monitored for any symptom and given anti-viral Tamiflu as a preventive measure while her house was disinfected, the doctor from the provincial Preventive Medicine Centre told Reuters.
The news cycle in some parts of the world runs at a different speed than we are used to here. Often stories are a day or two old before they appear in the local papers, and then those stories are picked up, and printed by the International press. By the time we hear about them, they may already be 3 or 4 days old.
