News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Vietnam and Thailand have continued to battle avian influenza in recent weeks, with a total of 19 outbreaks reported in a dozen provinces, according to health officials of the two countries.

Vietnam has reported seven outbreaks in six provinces, while Thailand has reported 12 outbreaks in six provinces, according to information published by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).

(CIDRAP News) – Overcoming the threat of avian influenza is the single most pressing agricultural and public health issue facing Southeast Asia, Singapore's minister of state for national development, Cedric Foo, said yesterday in opening a regional meeting on the disease, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Avian influenza is expected to cost Asia $130 billion by 2005, according to Hur Young-joo of the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, as reported in the Dec 2 online edition of The Korea Times.

(CIDRAP News) – As public health ministers and officials from 13 Asian countries conferred in Bangkok last week on how to prevent the spread of H5N1 avian influenza, experts offered troubling predictions.

(CIDRAP News) – The Sri Racha Tiger Zoo in Thailand reopened Nov 18, one day after Thai authorities reported a final tally of 102 tigers lost in the zoo's outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – Healthy-looking ducks may be acting as a "silent" reservoir for the deadly H5N1 influenza, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today.

A new laboratory study of domestic ducks infected with several 2004 H5N1 viruses shows that ducks shed more of this virus compared with ducks infected with H5N1 viruses from 2003, researchers in Tennessee found. Ducks also shed the 2004 viruses from 1 to 7 days longer.

(CIDRAP News) – New cases of avian influenza in Southeast Asia this week have heightened surveillance, as key international health organizations ratchet up concerns about the pervasiveness of the disease

A 14-month-old Vietnamese boy who died on Sep 5 has been posthumously confirmed as a victim of H5N1 avian influenza, news reports said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Thailand, home of the world's fourth-largest poultry industry, has confirmed that the recent re-emergence of avian influenza has spread to 21 provinces, three more than just yesterday. Meanwhile, Vietnam's state media yesterday reported that the disease there now affects Bac Ninh province in the northern part of the country in addition to the 11 southern provinces already affected.

(CIDRAP News) – Experts in Vietnam confirmed today that avian influenza has spread to an 11th province, the southern Mekong Delta province of Long An, a major poultry breeding area, according to news service reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Deadly strains of avian influenza have resurfaced on one poultry farm in China and two in Thailand.

China's first outbreak of H5N1 avian flu since March was reported Jul 3 at a farm in Anhui province in the east-central part of the country, according to Xinhua, China's official news service. The national avian flu reference laboratory confirmed yesterday that the disease was due to an H5N1 virus, Xinhua said.