A 35-year-old Vietnamese has died after eating chicken and become the country's 42nd victim of bird flu, Vietnamese media reported Tuesday as experts and world health officials met in Geneva to discuss ways to harness the epidemic.
"This is the first death since the start of this year's epidemic season," Vietnam's Tien Phong newspaper reported quoting Deputy Health Minister Trinh Quan Huan.
The report said bird flu outbreaks were found in five provinces and the capital Hanoi in the past month and some 20,000 birds had been killed.
Meanwhile, debates over whether the virus could be eradicated from poultry continued on Tuesday at an international conference in Geneva aimed at developing a common approach to deal with bird flu and human pandemic flu.
Experts of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said at the gathering that with enough money, the virus could be eliminated from poultry globally within a year.
"On the one hand there's a certain frustration, but we see the money now flowing, so we're more optimistic than we were half a year ago," said Samuel Jutzi, director of animal production and health at the UN agriculture agency.
However, Alejandro Thiermann, president of the International Animal Health Code at the World Organization for Animal Health, challenged Jutzi's opinions.
"We know that unless the virus changes its behavior it will continue to be successfully carried by wildlife and throughout the world we have close contact between wildlife and poultry," he said.
More than 400 animal and human health experts, senior policy makers, economists and industry representatives gathered in Geneva to work toward a global strategy to control the H5N1 bird flu virus in domestic animals and prepare for a potential human flu pandemic.
The meeting, from Monday to Wednesday, is co-organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Organization for Animal Health and the World Bank.
At the meeting, a WHO official said on Tuesday the world could produce vaccines much faster than before but still not fast enough for the planet's whole population.
Klaus Stohr, coordinator of the WHO's global influenza program, said global pharmaceutical industry can now produce 900 million vaccines within eight months of analyzing a new virus strain, which is still insufficient for the world's 6.4 billion people.