Vietnam Confirms 42nd Flu Death

(AP)  Vietnam, the country hit hardest by bird flu, reported another death on Tuesday.

Vietnam confirmed that a 35-year-old man who died on Oct. 29 had contracted bird flu. The man was admitted to a Hanoi hospital four days after his family bought a prepared chicken from a market near his house.

The case, the first in three months in Vietnam, raised the country's death toll to 42, the highest of any nation.

Vietnam will launch large-scale drills in the second half of November to test the country's pandemic readiness, said health ministry spokesman Pham Tuan Hung. The drills will include treating patients, disinfecting the environment and operating mobile units.

Meanwhile, the Swiss maker of Tamiflu said it had stopped selling the antiviral drug in China and was turning over supplies to the government.

In related developments:

Japan will cull 170,000 more chickens after a bird flu virus from the H5 family was detected at farm north of Tokyo, a news report said Tuesday. Officials said the chickens probably had the H5N2 strain of the virus, which is less virulent than the H5N1 strain that has ravaged Southeast Asia since 2003 and killed at least 63 people there.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Tuesday rejected a parliamentary call for a six-month moratorium on some poultry imports, saying the bill could hurt Ukraine's chances of joining the World Trade Organization.

On Monday, authorities ordered all live poultry markets in Beijing to close immediately and went door-to-door seizing chickens and ducks from private homes. Beijing also announced 6 million birds had been slaughtered around the site of China's most recent bird flu outbreak, and the World Health Organization said it had been asked to help in the reopened investigation of the country's possible first human cases of the virus.

Brazilian authorities discarded the presence of bird flu in Latin America's largest country on Friday after tests showed no signs of the disease in a rooster that died with symptoms of the illness.

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