Tien Giang Province – Credit Wikipedia
# 7547
With the Middle East’s MERS-CoV and China’s H7N9 virus grabbing all of the headlines, it is sometimes easy to forget that the H5N1 virus remains endemic in birds in many areas of the globe and that it still poses a pandemic threat.
Vietnam was one of the earliest countries affected by the H5N1 virus, and for a time, lead the world in human cases and deaths (total as of July 2013: 125 cases, 62 deaths).
Through massive educational and regulatory efforts, 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 nearly 18 months 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.
This year, Vietnam has reported two human H5N1 infections, one fatal.
Today a report in from Tien Giang Province, in the southern part of the country, where tens of thousands of quail have been destroyed because of the virus.
This from the Saigon Daily.
Bird flu reoccurs in quails in Tien Giang Province
Bird flu has reoccurred in poultry in quail breeding farms in the Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang since July 2 and more than 26,000 infected quails have been destroyed in the province in the past month, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Several quail farms in Tien Giang have been hit by the H5N1 virus, which is likely to spread to other domestic bred birds.
The Ministry has hence sent an urgent dispatch to related agencies in Tien Giang, asking them to check quail farms and try to curb further bird flu outbreaks.
Under current regulations, poultry found infected with the bird flu virus must be destroyed and all other domestic bred birds in the locality must be vaccinated.
The Department of Animal Health is under orders to test the vaccines for chickens and ducks on quails. After vets verify these vaccines, an intensive vaccination campaign will be conducted.
As we learned in 2009 - when we were preoccupied with bird flu in Asia, and an H1N1 swine flu emerged in North America - it is important not to focus solely on any one single threat.
For now, H5N1 remains primarily a threat to poultry. The virus remains poorly adapted to human physiology, and despite ample opportunities to cause illness in humans, the virus only causes rare, sporadic infections.
But H5N1, like all influenza viruses, is constantly changing . . looking for an evolutionary advantage.
So we watch it, along with others in the wild, for any signs that it may be better adapting to humans.
