Bird flu kills young child in Vietnam, hits poultry

By Ho Binh Minh

HANOI (Reuters) - Bird flu killed a four-year-old boy from an ethnic minority group in northern Vietnam, the country's first human case in nearly five months, a health official said on Thursday.

Separately, the government said the virus had returned to the Mekong Delta in the south this month, killing hundreds of ducks and chickens.

The boy from the Thai ethnic minority group fell sick and was taken to a Hanoi hospital on Dec. 14 with high fever and serious pneumonia, the official at the Preventive Medicine Centre in the mountainous province of Son La said.

The child died on Dec. 16 and tests performed in a Vietnamese laboratory have found the H5N1 virus.

"He was sick after he and his family had eaten about 10 chickens," the official told Reuters by telephone from Son La, 320 km northwest of Hanoi, adding a few of the birds had died from an unknown cause earlier on at the farm.

"We have identified 24 people related to the boy. Eighteen of them had direct contact with him, but none of them was sick," he said.

Vietnam's last reported death from the virus was in August when a teenager died. An outbreak in poultry was last reported in October, but Son La was not on the government's bird flu watchlist.

The Son La official said animal health workers slaughtered 1,000 poultry and disinfected the area where the boy had lived.