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 (WHO) 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 be in 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 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 on 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 occur-red on Dec. 30 and the most recent, an 8-year-old girl, died on 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 today.
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 2 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.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS