Nguyen Huy Nga, Director of the Ministry of Health’s Department for Preventive Health, issued the warning at a meeting of the National Steering Committee for Combating Avian Influenza in Humans in Hanoi on July 22 that A/H1N1 flu is beginning to spread to the community.

The health official emphasized to the need to continue monitoring those infected passengers who entered the country by air and via land borders in addition to stepping up monitoring of other infected people living in the community, so that effective measures can be promptly taken to mitigate the effects of the disease.

According to Dr. Nguyen Tran Hien, Director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE), no A/H1N1 outbreak has yet been detected in communities in the north.

He said that all A/H1N1 patients in Vietnam have had some connection in one way or another with passengers entering the country. So epidemiological and viral research should be conducted as soon as possible to help specialists gain deeper insight into the disease, its mechanisms of infection, and the possibility of drug resistance as well as mutation when the virus combines with other flu diseases.

The NIHE will train local health workers in methods to identify the A/H1N1 virus so that they can respond quickly to the disease as it spreads further.

The World Health Organisation has provided Vietnam with 500 A/H1N1 quick test kits.

The same day, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued decision 1073/QD-TTG that grants free treatment to A/H1N1 patients and allowances to those involved in combating the disease.