# 4517
From IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), which was founded in 1995 and is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, we get this optimistic overview of the lessons learned by Vietnam from SARS, Bird Flu, and H1N1.
This is admittedly a `softball’ piece, extolling the progress made by Vietnam in containing bird flu and downplaying the challenges that remain.
Towards the end, mention is made of the ambivalence of farmers towards vaccinating their flocks, but the article is mostly upbeat.
Of course, compared to the `bad old days’ of 2004 and 2005, Vietnam has made significant progress in their fight against H5N1. By 2006, they’d gone from being the worst afflicted country in the world to being viewed as the `poster child’ for successful bird flu containment.
But that victory was fleeting.
After more than a year of quiescence, the virus retuned in 2007. Since then, Vietnam has been engaged in a more-or-less constant battle with sporadic outbreaks of the virus in poultry, along with occasional human infections and fatalities.
On the plus side (at least when grading on the curve) Vietnam does boast better disease surveillance, reporting, and treatment centers than do many of their neighboring countries and their CFR (case fatality ratio) among bird flu patients is 50% compared to the more than 80% fatality rate seen in Indonesia.
So the Vietnam story is not all bad.
Still, the virus remains endemic in that country, and as such, represents an ongoing threat.
That said, here is the IRIN story.
VIETNAM: Lessons learned from SARS, bird flu, H1N1
Photo: BiotecVietnam has worked hard at improving preparedness
HANOI, 22 April 2010 (IRIN) - Several years ago, when patients arrived at hospital with pneumonia that did not respond to standard antibiotics, doctors in Vietnam began to get scared.
Attacking perfectly healthy people, it was obvious that this was no ordinary illness. Patients, as well as health workers caring for them, were dying as epidemiologists raced to identify what was causing the disease.
“We were in a panic,” Nguyen Trung Cap, who was working at the National Institute for Tropical and Infectious Diseases in Hanoi when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) struck Vietnam in 2003.
“We did not know if we would wake up in the morning and see people still alive.”
But Vietnam did survive, and indeed it weathered more devastating diseases to come.
In 2004, avian influenza arrived, hitting Vietnam particularly hard.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 60 people in Vietnam had died of avian influenza as of 21 April, making Vietnam second only to Indonesia in terms of the number of human fatalities from the H5N1 virus.
When H1N1 influenza (popularly known as swine flu) emerged last year, Vietnam was hit yet again. But this time, say officials, it was prepared.
Early identification and quarantine measures helped curtail the spread of H1N1, officials say, reducing the number of people infected.
