Health Minister Nguyen Quoc Trieu inspected a health screening device at Tan Son Nhat International Airport with airport officials Wednesday

Health Minister Nguyen Quoc Trieu has told authorities in Ho Chi Minh City and southern provinces with border gates to “not let any H1N1 patient escape the net” to avoid the spread of the influenza virus in Vietnam.

Trieu said he put special emphasis on the airport because it is the biggest international port in the country, receiving some 10,000 people every day from around the world.

“There’s a very high risk of the disease being transmitted [by infected people coming] through the airport,” he said.

Tightening the net

Nguyen Van Sau, director of the HCMC International Health Quarantine Center, said the center has checked almost 70,000 passengers at the airport from the first day of the campaign on April 26 until Tuesday.

Among them were 7,736 passengers coming from countries that have reported cases of influenza A.

The center also set up a medical team that will be posted at the airport at all times to measure the temperature of passengers coming from overseas.

The HCMC Department of Health Wednesday reported local agencies had quarantined four people with “abnormal symptoms” in order to test them for the influenza A (H1N1) virus.

Two local boys, seven and eight years old, were taken to Children’s Hospital No.1 and Children’s Hospital No.2 after entering Vietnam on flights from South Korea and Singapore.

The other two cases involved a 32- year-old Japanese tourist arriving from New York and a 69-year-old overseas Vietnamese man, the department not revealing where the man had arrived from. Both of them are being monitored at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

Trieu praised the city’s efforts thus far.

He agreed to provide three new temperature scanning devices and asked the city Health Department to staff the quarantine center properly to ensure proper alertness and vigilance by the workers.

An official from Tay Ninh Province Health Department also told the minister about the risk of the virus entering Vietnam via Moc Bai border gate in the province.

More than 1,470 foreigners travel through Moc Bai every day, 354 of them having recently come from virus-affected areas.

Trieu ordered An Giang, Kien Giang and Long An provinces, which share borders with Cambodia, to step up surveillance.

He said any agency managing to contain the virus will be awarded and that, likewise, those that let an infected passenger “slip through the net” will be penalized.

Steering committee reports

The central steering committee charged with preventing and fighting pandemics held a meeting in Hanoi Wednesday to issue further warnings related to influenza A (H1N1).

Nguyen Huy Nga, head of the Bureau of Preventive Health, said the spread of the disease has been slower in recent days but warned of a possible relapse, similar to the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.

The committee announced that the health ministers from all ASEAN countries will meet in Thailand this week to discuss preventive measures against influenza A (H1N1).

Officials at the meeting reported that the National Institute of Infectious and Tropical Diseases had admitted a patient arriving from the Czech Republic, who had transited through Germany.

The institute also cleared a South Korean visitor who was found to be infected with the normal H3 strain of influenza.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs told the meeting that six Vietnamese citizens, including two children, are being quarantined in Hong Kong after a local health facility found they were staying in the same hotel as another guest infected with the influenza A (H1N1) virus.

All six are in good health and will return to Vietnam after the required time of quarantine, the minister said.

As of Wednesday, the H1N1 virus had attacked 21 countries worldwide, with the US and Mexico reporting transmission between humans.

Reported by Thanh Tung