Sixteen staff at a Vietnamese joint venture of British oil giant BP are being tested in an international clinic after an anthrax alert at one of its offices, company officials said Thursday.
The alert was called after a suspicious substance was found in a meeting room at the Ho Chi Minh City headquarters of lubricants joint venture BP Petco last week, the firm's general manager John Kilgour told AFP.
Kilgour said the 16 were only being monitored as a precautionary measure after an initial medical checkup failed to give them a completely clean bill of health.
They probably only had common coughs or colds, he said.
The definitive test results on the substance would probably not be known for another 48 hours so BP wanted to take every precaution in the meantime, Kilgour said.
"We briefed our BP Petco staff. We have also implemented a protocol to monitor their health and well-being until we receive the definitive test results."
A medical checkup of the other 22 of the company's 80 staff who were in the building at the time of the discovery had found them to be completely healthy.
Only three of the company's staff are expatriates, the rest being Vietnamese.
BP Petco was continuing its business operations in Vietnam using other offices, Kilgour said.
"We have revised our security awareness in line with our global position," he said.
The British embassy said it had been involved in regular security consultations with BP and other British firms based in Vietnam even before the incident.
It would remain so on a continuous basis, a spokesman said.
But the embassy had no immediate plans to update its travel advice to ordinary tourists -- HANOI, (AFP)
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