Amid disturbing news that a Chinese man contracted bird flu directly from his son, a Vietnamese health official affirmed the Southeast Asian nation has yet to receive official confirmation from WHO of human-to-human transmission cases in any country.
Dr. Nguyen Huy Nga, who heads the Ministry’s Preventative Health Department, said the World Health Organization only warned the H5N1 deadly strain could mutate into a form able to transmit from humans to humans.
“The Chinese human-to-human transmission case could have happened under rare circumstances due to prolonged exposure to the infected person”, Dr. Nga added.
Doctor Nguyen Tran Hien, director of the Vietnamese Central Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology, also assured no human-to-human transmission case has ever been detected in the country and that infections all stemmed from contact with sick fowls.
But Hien warned the virus is showing signs of transforming into more lethal forms since the fatality rate from H5N1 infection has jumped to nearly 100% from 55% several years ago. So far this year, five Vietnamese are reported to have contracted bird flu, and all have died.
Yesterday, Channel News Asia (CNA) reported that a 24-year-old man in Nanjing “probably infected his father with the H5N1 strain of bird flu before dying”.
The Singapore-based media corp. said “the case is one of a handful over the last four years in which the H5N1 virus is suspected to have spread from one person to another”.
The article also quoted an epidemiologist as saying such suspected cases have all been "within the family, among blood relatives".
Since 2003, there have been 373 bird flu infections worldwide with 236 fatalities, 52 of which were in Viet Nam.
