WP,pg1: On Front Lines Of Asian Battle Against Bird Flu

[DeepModem Mom]

On Front Lines Of Asian Battle Against Bird Flu
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 22, 2005; A01


HANOI -- Behind high gray double doors, Professor Nguyen Thu Van, a simply dressed woman with black hair held back by a barrette, has been laboring tirelessly with her team of researchers in a race to avert a pandemic.

Her white-coated co-workers scurried about one recent day in their small, second-floor laboratory in an elegant French colonial building in the Vietnamese capital. Engaged in a drive to perfect a human vaccine against avian influenza, Van, 50, has produced an experimental version and conducted successful tests on monkeys. She and her researchers have volunteered to be the first subjects in human trials, which she hopes will begin this summer despite warnings from the World Health Organization.

Van is at the forefront of a campaign in Southeast Asia to halt the progress of bird flu. International health specialists say they fear the virus could undergo genetic changes suddenly and become the most deadly disease to strike humanity in modern times. Almost 200 million chickens, ducks and other birds throughout Southeast Asia have died from the virus or been slaughtered to contain it in the last two years.

So far, bird flu has killed 53 people, mostly as a result of close contact with infected poultry. But international health experts say they suspect the virus has also begun to spread among humans.

With bird flu endemic among birds in the Asian countryside, the disease could pose a threat to humans for years. And in an age of global travel, health experts predict that an easily transmitted human strain could move beyond Asia in a matter of weeks and infect tens of millions of people worldwide....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100908_pf.html