Experts ponder why Vietnam's young hit by bird flu

Hanoi - Four of the five people killed in Vietnam by an outbreak of bird flu were children, and the other the mother of one of the young victims, but experts don't know why the young seem to be more at risk.

At Hanoi's pediatric hospital, the front line in the country's battle against bird flu, doctors wearing goggles and gowns monitor nine children, all suffering from a respiratory illnesses that doctors fear could be bird flu.

The World Health Organization says there has been no sign the disease is being spread between humans. Its victims are believed to have caught it from infected chickens. Eating cooked chicken and eggs is safe, officials say.

But the experts do not know if children are more susceptible to the H5N1 virus because they play outside and are more likely to come into contact with chicken droppings, or because their immune systems are weaker.

"Until now, the flu has particularly been in children, but we don't know why," said Dr Nguyen Nang Tan, a neurologist at the Vietnam France Hospital in Hanoi.

None of the nine children in hospital in Hanoi is in critical condition.

Peter Horby, a WHO epidemiologist, questioned the masked and gowned mothers of the nine sick children Monday afternoon, as the woman sat cradling their sick babies, looking for clues.

"The children that got the H5N1, we still don't know where they got it from," he said. "Clearly the concern is they got it from the chickens."

The four children who died were admitted to the hospital already very sick and rapidly deteriorated, Horby said. The first death occurred on December 30 and the most recent, an eight-year-old girl, died Saturday, two days after she was admitted.

An alarmed government has urged parents to be on guard for the virus that has threatened to mar the Tet, or Lunar New Year, holiday that begins Wednesday.

The dead were all from rural northern provinces, which are dotted with farms, while the worst outbreak of the flu in chickens has been in the south.

No confirmed human infections of H5N1 have been reported in the south, the WHO says.

About two million chickens have been killed by the disease or have been culled as authorities try to stamp it out.

The transport of chickens has been banned across much of the south and their sale has been stopped in the country's biggest city, Ho Chi Minh City, also in the south. -- Annanova News

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