Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, May 6 2006 (IPS) – The annual Tet Festival, celebrated in Vietnam to mark the arrival of the lunar new year, brought with it good health tidings for the government of that South-east Asian country, this year. The festival, in January, was free of the bird flu menace and the run of good luck has held.
Credit must go to Hanoi s policies which contrasted with what prevailed in the previous two years, when the days around the Tet Festival and afterwards saw surges in the spread of the lethal avian flu virus.
The wet markets in the big cities are closed. They are like a cemetery now, said Jeff Gilbert, avian influenza coordinator at the Vietnam office of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), referring to the large poultry markets where chickens were slaughtered in the open. These markets, an ubiquitous presence across the region, were one of the factors behind the spread of the H5N1 strain of bird flu.
Consequently, Vietnam has not recorded a bird flu outbreak in its poultry population since Dec. 15, confirmed Gilbert during a telephone interview from Ho Chin Minh City, in the south of the country. It has moved out of the emergency phase.
Other factors also contributed towards this achievement. A programme to vaccinate all the poultry launched last September has been completed, with most birds vaccinated twice. And a publicity drive to make people aware of the dangers posed by bird flu has also had the desired result, added Gilbert. The people are more aware and there is a noticeable change of behaviour among farmers and the public to be more careful.
For public health workers, it is a record that offers an apt backdrop for a three-day meeting of officials from the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum to prepare an avian flu pandemic and mitigation plan. The host country of the meeting which runs from May 4-7 has seen the most number of human fatalities since the H5N1 outbreak began in December 2003. Forty two people were counted dead.
There are good lessons for APEC to draw from Vietnam, such as the government s commitment to compensate farmers for poultry culled and the public awareness at the community level, Dr. Shigeru Omi, head of the World Health Organisation s (WHO) Western Pacific regional office, told IPS. Information sharing with the international community has been good. It helps plan responses.
The lead taken by Hanoi to aggressively push ahead with programmes to contain the virus means once they decide to do something, they do it, Omi added. They have shown there is no time to be complacent.
Vietnam has had no human cases this year, compared with 48 cases and 13 deaths in the same period last year, the Geneva-based body said in a background note.
But this is not the only time that one of the world s five remaining communist-ruled countries has proved that its system of governance discredited by many since the end of the Cold War appears well-prepared to handle a public health crisis when challenged.
In early 2003, months before the bird flu outbreak, it was winning plaudits for curbing the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the lethal virus that began to spread across Asia and beyond, killing 778 people from 26 countries and infecting over 5,000 people.
Vietnam was the first to stop the spread of SARS at a time when the world was gripped in panic, like bird flu now, prompting hope that other countries could also follow. Behind its success lay measures like immediate identification of infected patients, a history of who they had been recently in contact with, isolating the SARS patients in hospitals and providing protective gear to health workers treating the patients.
They showed with SARS that they have a system that works. There was action following decisions, like quarantining people, said WHO s Omi. It is the kind of political will and resources we need to fight these diseases.
APEC, which includes Pacific-Rim countries, has among its members China, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, Russia and South Korea. Those that have been hit by human infections due to bird flu include China, Thailand and Indonesia, in addition to Vietnam. Others like Japan, Malaysia, Russia and South Korea have poultry populations that have been infected.
So far, 205 people in nine countries have been infected by the lethal virus since 2003, of which 113 people have died, according to the WHO. And if that fatality rate is not worrying enough 55 percent in nearly two-and-a-half years human infection cases during the first four months of this year alone were much more. In three countries, hit by human cases of bird flu between January and April, the fatality rate has been close to 90 percent, with Indonesia having 12 deaths from 13 infected people, China reporting six deaths from eight infected and Azerbaijan recording five fatalities form seven cases.
The need for more successes like Vietnam are urgent, say U.N. officials, given the fear that the deaths caused by avian flu could increase manifold, if the H5N1 strain mutates into one that can be passed among humans.
To curb that, there is a push among APEC officials meeting in the coastal city of Danang for a shift in the prevailing practice of poultry farming, the source of the disease. The group wants to see an end to the traditional trade of chickens in the open markets to one that places a premium on bio-safety.
The closure of the wet markets in Vietnam will help these measures, but there is still more to be done, said FAO s Gilbert. It needs labs to help with diagnosis to confirm new outbreaks and protection mechanisms, because time is critical.
