Bird Flu Found in Several Vietnam Pigs - FAO

(Planet Ark, 9/2/2004)

HANOI - A deadly strain of bird flu has been detected in initial tests of several Vietnamese pigs, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday, but a Vietnamese government official said they were unaware of any such finding.

"The H5N1 virus was in the nasal cavities of the pigs," said Anton Rychener, Vietnam representative of the U.N. agency. He added that blood tests on the pigs had been sent to Hong Kong and results were not yet returned. The pigs had not fallen ill with the virus that has killed at least 18 humans.

WHO spokesman in Hanoi Robert Dietz said in an emailed response Friday that the U.N. body was contacting the FAO about the comments.

If the FAO remarks were accurately reported, "these would be very preliminary results, and they are not confirmation that the virus is in pigs," Dietz said.

The finding is alarming because pigs can become a "mixing vessel" for the flu virus. The immune system of pigs is similar to that in humans and the animals suffer from a wide variety of diseases that also infect people.

Scientists say the bird flu pathogen could swap genes with a human influenza virus inside a pig.

NO IMMUNITY

The World Health Organization has said this could result in the emergence of a new subtype of virus for which humans would have no immunity.

Rychener said three or four pigs were initially positive for the virus and that he did not recall how many swine in total had been tested. "It complicates the matter," Rychener said, when asked what this meant for the current outbreak.

He said he was asking for an FAO veterinary epidemiologist to be sent to the Southeast Asian country to investigate further.

Animal health experts have been taking samples from pigs as a routine procedure where they find them raised alongside chickens.

Asked about the FAO comment, an official at the Department of Animal Health said: "We are not informed of any such finding. We know that the H5N1 is not found in the tested pigs from Vietnam.

The official added: "If FAO puts out that statement, they must make clear where the tests have been conducted."

State media in the communist country ran articles Friday saying samples taken from 179 pigs in Vietnam's northern provinces were found to be free from bird flu.

The Nhan Dan (People) daily, the official paper of the Communist Party, said that according to a WHO lab in Hong Kong, no H5N1 virus was found in the pig samples.

Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper quoted Truong Van Dung, director of the Veterinary Institute, as saying that nasal fluid samples from 179 pigs tested negative for H5N1.

The article said Dung contacted the WHO lab in Hong Kong by telephone and was given the results.

More than 14 million of Vietnam's 250 million poultry have been destroyed so far to try to halt the spread of the virus, which has ravaged poultry flocks across Asia.