A 10-year-old girl from Hanoi, Vietnam, has died from avian flu, marking a 50th death human death caused by the H5N1 virus in Asia. Vietnam has seen 36 of these, Thailand 12 and Cambodia two.

This follows the government’s launch of a national clean-up campaign design to control the spread of bird flu by disinfecting large-scale commercial chicken operations but also backyard farms which are now being associated with the rapid spread of the disease.

“The risk of bird flu recurrence is unavoidable because of people’s limited awareness and poor poultry farming conditions,” said Vietnam’s Vice Minister of Health, referring to the common practice of villagers keeping a few chickens in their yard, where epidemic surveillance  does not exist at all.

At the same time, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation announced that the recent outbreak of bird flu in North Korea poses no threat to human health. The virus has been preliminarily identified as the H7 strain which cannot be passed on to humans. A total of 219,000 birds have been culled in the country to prevent its further spread.

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