Lessons Learned From SARS, Bird Flu, H1N1

This Eurasia Review news piece situates the 2009 H1N1 influenza (popularly known as swine flu) outbreak in the history of other health communication challenges that Vietnam has faced in recent years, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and avian influenza (caused by the H5N1 virus). Since the outbreak of SARS in 2003, Vietnam has - as reported here - dramatically stepped up its disease surveillance, and the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States (US) government have invested heavily in new laboratory equipment and training. From the perspective of Nguyen Tran Hien, director of Vietnam's National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, "[i]f something new emerges, we can send our teams to get a specimen and conduct an investigation. A quick response means early containment."

Officials from more than 70 countries who attended the International Ministerial Conference on Animal and Pandemic Influenza in Hanoi, Vietnam, in April 2010 warned that countries need to stay on this kind of war-like footing against emerging diseases in order to prevent a pandemic. Complacency, which increased when H1N1 turned out to be not as virulent as first thought, threatens to undermine these achievements. "I think the biggest challenge is how we communicate the risk," Jean-Marc Olive, WHO's country representative in Vietnam, said. The deputy director of the Animal Health Department in Vietnam's southern Tien Giang Province admitted that poultry farmers are starting to get careless about avian influenza because there has been no outbreak in the province in 2 years. "Farmers no longer cooperate with us," said Le Minh Khanh, who noted that only 60% of flocks have been inoculated this year.

If Vietnam is hit by yet another new infectious disease, Nguyen Trung Cap, who was working at the National Institute for Tropical and Infectious Diseases in Hanoi during the SARS outbreak, is recorded here as indicating that the country is ready. However, the implication is that communication is necessary to ensure that people acknowledge and appreciate the risk and take appropriate actions - even if outbreaks are not currently an issue.