Students wear face masks at a high school in Tan Binh District, HCMC

Vietnam will double-check all deaths related to swine flu diagnosis and treatment, Nguyen Huy Nga, head of the health ministry’s Preventive Health and Environment Department has told Thanh Nien.

Since the country’s first flu patient was detected in May, six H1N1-positive people have died nationwide, four of them over the last two weeks, raising public concerns about diagnostic and treatment capabilities. Two of the patients who died, a 9-year-old boy and a 19-year-old woman, did not suffer from chronic diseases that can pose fatal risks to H1N1 patients.

In fact, the boy from the southern province of Dong Nai was admitted to a local hospital on September 2 – three days after he fell sick. He was given the antiviral drug Tamiflu and tested for H1N1 one day later. The boy was diagnosed as having the flu after another three days.

The young woman from the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre was also hospitalized two days after falling sick, yet was only given Tamiflu two days later while awaiting her test results. She died on September 12, one day after getting the results.

The country’s diagnostic facilities are now overloaded with thousands of H1N1 tests that each take four to six hours, yet this was not the reason for patients receiving late treatment, Nga said.

“The Ministry of Health has warned that patients with swine flu symptoms should be treated immediately, even as test results for the virus are awaited,” the official said.

Nguyen Tran Hien, director general of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, said, “Most of the patients were admitted to hospitals late.”

Moreover, depending on each patient, the disease can develop quickly and prove fatal, Hien added.

In fact, all the deaths are related to either late hospitalization in critical conditions, or chronic and mental diseases, according to Ly Ngoc Kinh, head of the health ministry’s Administration of Diseases Examination and Treatment.

The boy in Dong Nai Province, for example, was hospitalized late with already critical symptoms, which can partly explain why the health agency incorrectly diagnosed at first [as encephalitis], Kinh said.

Pending vaccines

While China and many other countries have announced that vaccines against the influenza A (H1N1) virus will be introduced around the middle of next month, Vietnam is yet to place orders as the prices haven’t been fixed, according to Hien.

However, the country plans to order some five million doses s of the vaccine to be given free to people with high risks including those with chronic diseases and health workers, he said.

Vietnam is also applying to receive part of 150 million free vaccine doses that the World Health Organization will supply to poor countries, Hien added.

While the vaccine is yet to be available, the epidemic is growing strongly in provinces and cities like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Khanh Hoa, where 20 percent of patients fell sick without knowing the source of infection, the health official warned.

The rate of infections is likely to become higher in the winter, he added.

The health ministry reported the flu sickened another 262 people on Tuesday, increasing the country’s tally to 5,164.

The country’s fatality rate now stands at around 0.13 percent, which is equal to that of common flu, Hien from the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology said.

Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Vietnamese woman who tested positive for H1N1 has died in Taiwan after giving birth to a baby two days before, the local newspaper China Post reported.

She was admitted to a hospital in on August 23 with critical flu symptoms while being six months pregnant, the news source quoted Yeh Yen-po, director of the Chuanghua County government’s health department, as saying.

She was given Tamiflu, but her condition didn’t improve, the paper added.

On September 11 she gave birth to a baby boy, who is now in stable condition and hasn’t shown any flu symptoms, the paper quoted the physician attending to the woman as saying.

Source: Thanh Nien, Tuoi Tre