Vietnam Finds Three New Bird Flu Patients-media

HANOI (Reuters) - Three more Vietnamese have contracted bird flu, taking the number of infections in the country to 52 since December. Eighteen of the patients have died, a health official was quoted on Thursday as saying.

The three new cases, a 30-year-old man and two women, were detected in Hanoi since the middle of May, Trinh Quan Huan, head of the Health Ministry's Preventive Medicine Department, was quoted as saying by e-newspaper VNExpress on its Web site, vnexpress.net.

"All the three have been infected in relation to sick poultry," Huan said in an interview. "Their condition is not serious and by now the 30-year-old man has been discharged."

The two women were still being treated in a Hanoi hospital.

"The outbreak has slowed recently," he added.

A World Health Organisation statement seen on Thursday said Vietnam's Health Ministry had informed the WHO of the three infections. It said the ministry had also confirmed a death by the H5N1 virus that was earlier reported as a suspected case.

Last month, health officials said a 46-year-old man from the northern province of Hung Yen, 65 km (40 miles) southeast of Hanoi, was suspected of having died of the H5N1 virus.

A Health Ministry report said the virus had killed 18 people since December 16, 2004, when the disease resurfaced, taking the country's total to 38 since it appeared in late 2003.

The disease also killed 12 Thais and four Cambodians.

The government anti-bird flu committee was told on Wednesday that poultry in the northern province of Nam Dinh and the southern province of Tien Giang would be vaccinated later this month on a trial basis, state media said.

In August, vaccination of waterfowl and chickens would become mandatory in the regions facing a high infection risk, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported.

Bird flu first emerged in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam in late 2003, then spread to the northern region where the virus appears to develop rapidly during the winter.

Scientists fear the avian flu, which is infectious in birds but does not spread easily among humans, could mutate into a form capable of generating a pandemic in which millions of people without immunity could die.