A Vietnamese teenager has been confirmed as having the H5N1 bird flu virus, health officials in the northern port city of Haiphong said yesterday.
Doctors from the health department in Haiphong said laboratory tests showed 15-year-old Vu Van Hoa, who is being treated at a local hospital, had contracted the strain.
"His condition is stable and slowly recovering," said a doctor from Haiphong's Viet-Tiep hospital, adding that Hoa had been transferred to another hospital in Hanoi for treatment.
Hoa was hospitalized late last week together with four other patients from Haiphong who were suspected of having bird flu.
However, tests performed on the other four were negative for H5N1, they said.
Meanwhile, China called bird flu a "serious epidemic" and pledged to step up measures to fight the virus yesterday, while Japan joined Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US in slapping a ban on poultry from a western Canadian province.
"The government is making all efforts to combat bird flu, which is a serious epidemic in China," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) told reporters at a routine briefing.
Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan followed the US in temporarily halting poultry imports from mainland British Columbia, where Canadian officials said they found a duck infected with bird flu.
Canada has insisted the bird caught a North American strain of the disease that was less virulent than the virus that has hit poultry in Asia and killed at least 67 people in the region since 2003.
Officials have started to cull the 56,000 birds on the farm where the duck was found.
In Hong Kong, Leung Pak-yin (梁柏賢), chief of the Center for Health Protection, promised business leaders on Monday that officials are ready for a flu pandemic.
"If anything happens in Hong Kong, we are sure that the one thing we want to ensure is we have the lowest mortality rate in Hong Kong and that we are the place that is going to recover first in the world, both from the health aspect and also from the economic aspect," Leung said.
also see stories:
Officials question UK about reasons for bird-flu claims
US adds 10 quarantine stations for bird flu screening
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to start construction of its 1.4-nanometer chip manufacturing facilities at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP, 中部科學園區) as early as October, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday, citing the park administration. TSMC acquired land for the second phase of the park’s expansion in Taichung in June. Large cement, construction and facility engineering companies in central Taiwan have reportedly been receiving bids for TSMC-related projects, the report said. Supply-chain firms estimated that the business opportunities for engineering, equipment and materials supply, and back-end packaging and testing could reach as high as
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Democratic nations should refrain from attending China’s upcoming large-scale military parade, which Beijing could use to sow discord among democracies, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) said. China is scheduled to stage the parade on Wednesday next week to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The event is expected to mobilize tens of thousands of participants and prominently showcase China’s military hardware. Speaking at a symposium in Taichung on Thursday, Shen said that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to New Delhi.
RSS