The Vietnamese Strain

In the race to develop a vaccine for bird flu, Vietnam has been a dark horse with early success. Vietnamese scientists have produced a prototype vaccine for the H5N1 avian-influenza strain and are planning human testing in Augustjust a few months behind top researchers in the U.S. There's good reason for the haste: 70% of the world's bird-flu deaths in the last two years occurred in Vietnam, and the government worries that the country could someday be ground zero of a pandemic if the flu mutates to become easily transferred among humans.

But the World Health Organization (WHO)...

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