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Despite an uneven performance over the past few months, Vietnam has made great strides over the past year in their fight against bird flu.
Credit, they say, goes to their aggressive vaccination program. Where new flareups have occurred, it has been due to `illegally-hatched and unvaccinated water fowls'.
Bird flu vaccines doing their job: experts
Vietnam’s anti-H5N1 vaccination campaign is its strongest weapon against the avian virus, according to bird flu experts at a conference in Hanoi Friday.
At the conference held by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Animal Health Department affirmed that the Chinese vaccines Vietnam had been using on its birds were performing very well.
Before Vietnam’s launch of a mass bird-flu inoculations in September 2005, Vietnam was among the worst-hit countries in the world with the highest number of culled birds and the second highest human death toll.
But recent farm surveys in northern provinces showed that 90 to 95 percent of vaccinated chickens and 100 percent of vaccinated ducks were now immune to bird flu.
Though bird flu has recurred in several localities this year, the outbreaks have been small and attributed to illegally-hatched and unvaccinated water fowls.
Analyses of Vietnamese bird flu samples performed at laboratories in Australia, the United States, China and Italy showed no major gene changing in the country’s virus as the similar genes ratio reached 96.7 to 98.6 percent.
Most of the experts at the conference agreed that the mass vaccination should be continued but stressed that bringing inoculation effectiveness closer to the 100% level should be Vietnam’s main concern.
Le Hong Minh of the Central Veterinary Medicine Enterprise emphasized the need for a grassroots veterinary system to implement anti-epidemic measures, including vaccination.
But there was some small debate as to whether or not Vietnam should continue its mass fowl inoculations to prevent the spread of bird flu.
Many asked why so few countries have conducted anti-bird flu vaccinations and whether the proceeds from poultry sector could compensate for Vietnam’s expensive nationwide campaign.
Reported by Quang Duan – Translated by Thu Thuy
