Vientam swine flu death rate ‘acceptable’ for now: official

Published: 22/09/2009 05:00

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A student has her temperature taken at a high school in HCMC

Vietnam’s ratio of H1N1-related deaths to the infection tally is at “acceptable” levels at the moment, a health official has said.

The Sai Gon Giai Phong newspaper quoted Nguyen Van Binh, deputy head of the health ministry’s Preventive Health and Environment Department, as saying the rate was still lower than neighboring countries like Malaysia and Thailand, where death tolls stand at 76 and 153 respectively.

As of Tuesday, Vietnam had recorded 7,362 H1N1infections with nine deaths, the Ministry of Health reported.

Binh noted that most of Vietnam’s victims had chronic diseases, had recently given birth or were admitted to hospitals too late for effective treatment.

Also on Tuesday, Da Nang Health Department Deputy Director Nguyen Ut said Nha Trang Pasteur Institute, the central region’s sole influenza A (H1N1) testing center, has run out of biological reagents to diagnose the virus.

As all tests are suspended now, any person who has the flu’s symptoms will be given treatment for the disease without waiting for test results, Ut said.

Early this month, Ly Ngoc Kinh, director general of the Medical Treatment Department under the Ministry of Health, had warned that Vietnam was about to exhaust its stock of testing substances.

While it’s awaiting new supplies that will take at least two months to arrive, the Institute of Biotechnology is cooperating with the Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City to develop the reagents.

However, the locally produced materials won’t be introduced before next January at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed concern that up to a quarter of the fatal swine flu cases in the Western Pacific regions were patients with no underlying medical conditions, AFP reported on Tuesday.

By September 19, an estimated 25 percent of the 352 death cases reported in the region had no prior medical problems, the news source quoted the UN health agency as saying at its Western Pacific annual conference in Hong Kong.

In other regions. the proportion of swine flu fatalities with no underlying medical condition ranged from 20 to 50 percent, Takeshi Kasai, the organization’s regional adviser on communicable disease surveillance and response, told the media on the sidelines of the conference.

“That worries us very much. We are looking into it,” he added.

Kasai said one of the more plausible hypotheses virologists had come up with was that the virus replicated more rapidly in those patients.

WHO was also concerned that young adults were dying of swine flu, while small children and elderly people tend to be the main groups that succumb to seasonal influenza, AFP quoted Kasai as saying.

The West Pacific region covers 37 countries and extends from China and Mongolia to Australia, New Zealand and French Polynesia.

Source: Thanh Nien, Agencies

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