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It could be nothing, or it could be the biggest news of the year. A South Korean man has died in Vietnam; specifically, in the region we used to call South Vietnam. He died of suspected avian influenza. The man, accompanied by his Vietnamese wife, was visiting her relatives when he was suddenly (and I mean suddenly) stricken with "bird flu-like symptoms," according to the Vietnamese physicians who attended him.

The following is the news story, from the Xinhua news agency:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_7025977.htm

Read that passage again: The dead man's father, who is in South Korea, is suffering from the same symptoms. The Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien offers some specifics on the dead man's arrival and departure, leading one to believe they have better inside sources.

A South Korean man died of pneumonia in Can Tho city Monday, local doctors, who suspect he had contracted bird flu, said.

The man was taken to the city General Hospital at 3:00AM Monday with high fever and breathing problems. He died at 2:00PM.

The doctors have sent his blood samples to Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City to test for the H5N1 strain of bird flu virus, which has caused 100 infections and 46 deaths in Vietnam in the last few years. (bold mine)

The man’s family said his father in Korea too was suffering from pneumonia-like symptoms. http://www.thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=33199

We know very, very little right now, except that Can Tho is near the border with Cambodia, and the newspaper accounts are growing in number and are appearing in both the Vietnamese and the Chinese press. Complicating things is the knowledge that human H5N1 cases have not been reported in this particular Vietnamese province, and there have been no real cases of South Korean human H5N1 infections, save for a January, 2007 infection of a poultry worker, who tested positive for antibodies to H5N1 and suffered only a mild infection. 

We do not know anything about the father of the dead man, his travel patterns -- nothing.  We do know one thing -- if the infection started in South Korea, the WHO could have an interesting next few days' worth of tracking down airline passengers.

Vietnam is considered the world's best practice at bird flu removal and containment. Last year, President Bush even stopped at the aforementioned Pasteur Clinic in Ho Chi Minh City to meet with the head researchers on avian influenza. The photo of that meeting is at left, since the American press, by and large, saw fit not to publish it. Vietnam has an extremely aggressive surveillance and culling operation going, and despite the nation's best efforts, there has been a resurgence of H5N1 cases in poultry, especially ducks. The U.S. government has given the Vietnamese government over $22 million to date to fight bird flu, with a focus on surveillance and payments to affected poultry farmers for culled birds.  In a striking coincidence, it was just announced today that an additional $10.5 million will be given to Hanoi to fight avian influenza -- and another $1.5 million to the WHO, earmarked for a human vaccine to be developed by the Pasteur Institute.

But Vietnam is cursed with its own "Ho Chi Minh Trail," and the bitter irony of this is certainly not lost on former US servicemen and women who served gallantly in Vietnam. The trail, this time, is a trail of smuggled poultry from China, on trails that snake along the Vietnam-China border. The photo at left shows this pattern of smuggling, and it serves as evidence that the laws of supply and demand apply, even in dueling Communist nations. Well, Communist in name and in totalitarianism, at least. Chickens and ducks have become much more expensive since bird flu came along, and farmers have found it more economical to simply smuggle their poultry in from China, rather than have to deal with the requirements of the military and health authorities.

If we first suspect H5N1 in the death in Vietnam, we must also suspect SARS, according to Dr. Henry Niman. In his latest commentary at http://www.recombinomics.com/News/11070701/H5N1_Vietnam_Korea.html , Dr. Niman states:

The above report of suspected bird flu among family members in southern Vietnam and South Korea raises more questions than it answers. Although reported transport of H5N1 via commercial airliner has been limited to exotic birds, transport of SARS CoV via airline accelerated the SARS outbreak in early 2002, and is a major red flag for the spread of infectious diseases in general.

The world anxiously awaits the outcome of testing of both Lu Chin-chu and his father.