Vietnamese storks and H5N1

HANOI, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Preliminary tests on wild storks at a theme park in Ho Chi Minh City showed the birds might be infected with an avian influenza virus, a Vietnamese official said on Friday. Huynh Huu Loi, director of the city's Animal Health Department, said more tests were being done to see if they had the H5N1 virus which has killed 42 people in Vietnam since 2003 but has not resurfaced for nearly eight months. "We have yet to look deep enough into the H5 component of bird flu virus, but the first results found the storks have influenza type A," said Loi, adding that park officials had been asked to destroy 53 storks. H5N1 is an influenza type-A virus which has killed 42 people in Vietnam since late 2003, although there have been no confirmed human infections this year. A 35-year-old man hospitalised this week in the southern province of Kien Giang tested negative for the disease, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said. "Vietnam retains its status of having no reported case in poultry or humans during 2006," said Laurence Gleeson, a senior FAO official and bird flu expert in Bangkok. Gleeson was sent to Laos this week to assess its surveillance efforts after bird flu was found last month on a farm south of the capital Vientiane, its first outbreak since 2004. He said there was no sign of further outbreaks as authorities began surveying a five-kilometre area around the farm on Friday. A poultry cull within a one kilometre (mile) zone was completed on Thursday. The latest outbreaks in Laos and Thailand, where bird flu killed a teenager in late July, fanned fears that the virus known to have killed 134 people worldwide was flaring up again in Asia. Vietnamese officials say a failure to control waterfowl, which can be silent carriers of bird flu, made the country vulnerable to new outbreaks and wild birds believed to carry H5N1 would soon migrate from the north, raising the risk of infection. Wild birds are natural hosts of bird flu viruses and often don't show symptoms but can pass the viruses to poultry. H5N1 can kill chickens within 24 hours of infection. The FAO has urged governments to be vigilant against a virus still circulating in poultry three years after it swept across much of Asia.

AlertNet news is provided by