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.
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