The Fatal Strain

by Alan Sipress

  Thailand would continue to struggle with bird flu over the coming months. But by the end of 2005, a massive campaign by health and agriculture officers coupled with thousands of local volunteers had again appeared to banish the virus. It would be déjà vu. In July 2006, after more than seven months without a case, a seventeen-year-old boy from a province north of Bangkok fell ill with a high fever, cough, and headache. He was hospitalized five days later, deteriorated rapidly, and died after another four.

  Thai health officials concluded that he, too, had caught the virus from a fighting cock. He had been infected while burying roosters that had died of bird flu. “The victim failed to report the death of his fighting cock because he was afraid the authorities would slaughter his birds,” Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters angrily.

  The livestock chief of the boy’s home province, Pichit, alleged an even wider cover-up, saying villagers had declined to notify officials that some of their cocks were dying because the birds were so expensive. Tests by the national livestock laboratory ultimately confirmed bird flu in samples taken from the carcass of a dead cock. When authorities learned of the outbreak and ordered that the surviving roosters be culled, the owners resisted. The livestock chief himself was disciplined for failing to prevent the outbreak, and a complete ban was slapped on cockfighting in Pichit and neighboring Phitsanu lok provinces.

  Ever since the virus resurfaced in late 2003, cockfighting has played a role in spreading it around Southeast Asia. At least eight confirmed human cases were possibly caused by infected fighting cocks during 2004 alone.

  These roosters have proven to be difficult targets for disease control efforts. Owners have frequently hidden their cocks when officials have ordered mass poultry culls. Others have smuggled the birds across provincial and even national lines to elude the dragnet. Each time they are moved, they risk introducing the virus to new flocks. When bird flu was confirmed for the first time in Malaysian poultry in August 2004, animal-health officers blamed illegal imports of fighting cocks from neighboring Thailand. In turn, several other countries banned imports of all Malaysian poultry, and an area of the northern Malaysian state of Kelantan, where the outbreak occurred, was put under quarantine to prevent further spread. The state’s chief minister, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, who doubled as the spiritual head of Malaysia’s Islamic opposition, slammed local cockfighters. He urged them to give up the sport and repent. While some Muslim clerics opposed the culling of cocks and other poultry as un-Islamic, Nik Aziz endorsed the draconian measure but asked that it be carried out away from villagers so as not to antagonize them.

  Some animal health investigators have also suggested that cocks exported from Thailand were behind the far wider outbreak of bird flu in Indonesia. In 2002, the year before the virus swept the region, Thailand shipped nearly six thousand fighting cocks abroad, most of them to Indonesia, according to the Kasikorn Research Center in Bangkok. Later, Thailand may also have been on the receiving end. Health officials speculated that illegal cockfighting tours reintroduced the virus from Laos into the northeast of their country after a long hiatus. Thai cock owners, including a government livestock officer whose own roosters later died, had been stealing across the broad Mekong River to pit their birds against Laotian opponents despite an outbreak on the far side of the border.

  The allegation by some Thai officials that cockfighting helped seed the regional epidemic leaves the sport’s partisans seething. “The government is telling lies,” Phapart retorted when I asked him about the claim. He insisted the poultry industry and not fighting cocks was to blame. (Some Thais have also objected to cockfighting on the grounds of animal cruelty, but their calls for prohibition have never gained traction.)

  To regulate the movement of fighting cocks, Thai agriculture officials suggested a modern, digital fix for this ancient pastime. They recommended inserting microchips into the roosters. But this prescription was no better received than the diagnosis. “That’s ridiculous,” Phapart scoffed. “They move around. They don’t stand still. How are you ever going to put a microchip into them?” He said a microchip could cramp their agility and leave them vulnerable. “When they fight, they get hit in every part of the body. It might create a weak spot. What if they get hit in the chip? They might run away and you would lose your thousand-dollar bet.” Senior Thai officials ultimately agreed with this widely shared critique and dropped the microchip proposal.

  They had only slightly better success with their plan for fighting-cock passports. Local veterinary departments began issuing travel documents for each rooster with its photograph on one side and a register of its movement on the other. Every time an owner planned to take his bird across district lines, he was required first to visit a government veterinarian, who would examine it, record the trip, and stamp the passport. These control measures were to be supplemented with random testing of fighting cocks. Phapart said he personally obeyed the regulations but the whole notion made him chuckle. “Many people don’t use the passports,” he explained. “Less sophisticated villagers don’t care. They just keep breeding and pitting their cocks like they always did. They just tell their friends that they’re going to meet up and hold a fight before the police come. They even have someone to look out for the police.”

  Phapart urged that cock owners be left to regulate themselves. In this age of cell phones, he said an outbreak in one village is instantly flashed across the district through text messages, and owners effectively quarantine the infected area themselves. No owner would want to see bird flu spread among his own prized roosters.

  “The decision makers analyze the situation just on paper,” he said, growing agitated again. “Their feet aren’t on the ground. They don’t really know how we treat the cocks and don’t really share our feelings. We care more for the fighting cocks than the health officers do.”

  But for a growing minority in Thailand, the debate keeps coming back to the basic question of whether it is time to ban the pastime altogether. Phapart leaned forward intently and vowed, “They’ll never be able to stop us from doing cockfighting.”

  In contrast to the brawny, exquisitely groomed gladiators of the cockpit, the vast majority of Asian chickens are scrawny, sorry creatures. In Indonesia they’re known as kampung chicken, or village chicken. They root around in the dust and slime, often living off discarded rice, fallen leaves, morsels of overripe mango, and whatever else they happen across. So when Indonesians are given a choice between dining on these vagabonds of the backyard and on their plumper distant cousins raised commercially for the market, the response is unanimous, and surprising. “It’s obvious,” Ketut Wardana, a Balinese villager with a shock of dark hair and droopy mustache, confirmed for me. “Kampung chicken is healthier, tenderer, and much more delicious. Our kampung chicken is raised on natural food, not those chemicals like the broiler chickens in the market.”

  In Bali, as throughout the Indonesian archipelago and much of the region, a home is not a home without a chicken, or several dozen. They pretty much come and go as they like, sleeping as often in trees and under beds as they do in their own cages. The Indonesian government estimates that 30 million households raise poultry. It is their intimate presence in the lives of so many Asians coupled with the near-total absence of safeguards against contagion that makes backyard poultry farming what the U.S. Agency for International Development has called “the greatest single challenge to effective control of the spread of the virus.”

  Wardana raises twenty-five chickens behind the ornately sculpted walls of his family’s traditional compound on Bali’s lush east coast. When he invited me inside the courtyard, the air was fragrant with frangipani blossoms and the grounds tranquil, shaded from the sun’s midafternoon rays by a stand of palms. At his feet, a black hen cackled. “It would be hard to imagine life without chickens,” he said, nodding with a laugh. “Life would lose its flavor without chickens.”

  Yet culinary concerns are the least of it. Chickens are central to home
economics, he continued, taking a seat on the wooden floor of his bale dangin, the raised pavilion at the heart of most every Balinese compound. They are a way out of poverty. If the family is hungry, they can always sup on chicken. If they’re short of cash, they can hawk them in the market and earn a premium over the price for commercial poultry. When the new school year began and his brother needed shoes for his two children, Wardana sold several chickens to raise the money, and chicken paid the doctor’s bill when his wife got sick. “They’re our living wallet,” he quipped.

  Chickens also constitute part of the social contract binding communities together, providing what Wardana’s matronly neighbor Made Narti described as the “solidarity of the centuries.” Though her good fortune has translated into a flock of several hundred chicks, she recalls a time when she was hungry and had to turn to her fellow villagers of Tegal Tegu for chicken. She said she has reciprocated countless times. “For generations, chickens have lived very close in the lives of us Balinese,” she recounted. The elderly raise chickens as a hobby. The devout raise them as a matter of faith. Four times a month, Narti slaughters a bird and carries it with a plate of fruit and flowers down the narrow, walled alley to a Hindu temple. It’s an offering to the gods.

  Some public health officials have urged an end to backyard farming. But it is so tightly stitched into the cultural fabric of Asian life that the prescription is sure to fail. “If you seriously proposed eradicating backyard poultry farming, you would get a lot of undesirable outcomes,” said Jeffrey Mariner, a veterinary professor at Tufts University dispatched to work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Indonesia. Senior FAO officials have cautioned that a ban would simply force poultry farming underground. This could also alienate villagers from other programs to control the virus, for instance notifying authorities of outbreaks, Mariner explained.

  Mariner is not one to underestimate the threat of flu. In early 2006, he helped set up and train teams of inspectors to uncover outbreaks that had gone undocumented. “We thought at the time we’d find that bird flu is underreported. We never imagined the extent to which this is true,” he said. They started with twelve districts on Java, then twenty-seven districts, then the outer islands. Everywhere the teams looked, they found the virus. Even on training exercises they found it. “It’s very widespread, and it’s difficult to address the disease, since it’s in the backyard system.”

  In the two months before my visit to the village of Tegal Tegu, Mariner’s teams had confirmed a dozen different outbreaks in Bali, including a pair just days earlier. Animal-health officials had burned more than a thousand chickens in a bid to contain the epidemic in one location on the resort island. Though Narti had heard about bird flu on television, she remained oblivious. “Bali is safe. There’s no bird flu here,” she assured me. Her warm eyes, full cheeks, and thick lips offered a mother’s comforting smile. “It happened on Java. The chickens that got bird flu on Java had white feathers. My chickens mostly have green feathers.”

  Researchers elsewhere in Southeast Asia have found that villagers are widely cognizant of bird flu’s perils yet continue to take risks with their own backyard birds. As they have for generations, they handle sick and dying fowl, butcher and eat birds that have died of illness, and even let their children play with infected livestock. The contradiction is not surprising. For years, long before the disease struck, they have seen their own relatives and neighbors engage in these practices and rarely come to harm. As a precaution, Narti volunteered she was in the habit of separating out any of her birds that seemed sick and fortifying the rest with vitamins, including a supplement to combat depression and stress. “But there’s really nothing to worry about,” she added. “I don’t think it could happen here.”

  Asia’s live poultry markets leave many Westerners queasy. Deep inside the cavernous Orussey Market in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, a short walk from the fairy-tale spires of the royal palace, scores of live chickens and ducks are crammed together, legs bound, on wood pallets speckled with droppings. Shoppers stoop over to scrutinize the birds like customers examining cantaloupes in a Safeway, then hang the beleaguered creatures upside down from hooks to measure their weight. Some shoppers carry off their cackling purchases to finish them off at home. Others turn them over to butchers, who hunch on the muddy floor, slitting throats and plucking feathers. So, too, in the dim light of Jakarta’s Jatinegara Market, one of more than thirteen thousand live poultry markets in Indonesia, a dozen boys squat amid stacks of pungent cages on a tile floor slick with death. With swift slices of the knife, these barehanded youths dismember the chickens and then tug out their entrails, heaping them up for waiting customers. Blood trickles down ruts in the floor and spills into the alley outside.

  Many Asians swear by freshly killed chicken, duck, and goose, insisting they are tastier and more nutritious. But Robert Webster has vigorously argued that “wet markets” represent a perilous nexus where flu viruses can amplify, swap genetic material, and spread. WHO’s expert committee on avian flu has endorsed this view. Each morning, live markets are restocked with birds, and with them new microbes. They can infect merchants, customers, and other animals, who by day’s end may carry the contagion onward to new frontiers. Researchers in the early 1990s identified live markets as a “missing link” to explain flare-ups of a low-pathogenic strain among poultry in the United States. After the 1997 human outbreak in Hong Kong, investigators ultimately traced six of the deaths back to wet markets. The city instituted new safeguards, including the screening of poultry from mainland China and a ban on the sale of live ducks and geese. But the virus nonetheless returned to Hong Kong’s markets five years later. On the mainland, where an even wider array of flu strains has continued to circulate amid the poultry stalls, Chinese researchers concluded that six city dwellers who came down with bird flu had likely caught it during recent market visits. These patients had no other known exposure to sick poultry.

  Yet despite these scientific warnings, Asian governments have been hard-pressed to break people of their longtime passion for freshly butchered meat. Some countries, notably Vietnam, have begun phasing out wet markets and building modern slaughterhouses. But Webster counseled that, as with backyard farming, a complete ban on wet markets would simply drive this commerce underground. Demand would remain strong and prices high while monitoring for disease would become far more difficult.

  Among Southeast Asians, it is Vietnamese who take fresh furthest, with a delicacy called tiet canh vit. This popular pudding is traditionally prepared from raw duck blood and served at meals to mark the anniversary of a death in the family, the celebration of Tet, the lunar New Year, and other special occasions. It is typically washed down with rice wine. Tiet canh vit is also sold widely in the market. Health investigators suspect that at least five people from two families in northern Vietnam contracted bird flu after feasting on the dish. After hearing this, I told a Vietnamese friend in Hanoi that I simply had to have the recipe. She e-mailed the following.

  1. Cut a small incision in the duck/chicken to get the blood in a bowl. Pour some drops of lime into the blood bowl.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix chopped bowel and stomach together.

  3. Mix the blood liquid (the first bowl) and the stock (the second bowl) with the ratio of one spoon blood to two spoons stock. You will also put some fish sauce in, as much as desired.

  4. Set aside for about half an hour. The mixture will form a texture like pudding cake.

  For many in Asia, birds are an essential element of everyday life, synonymous with sustenance, commerce, companionship, and even national identity. Moreover, for some, they are also linked to aspirations not just for this life but for the life to come.

  Over the centuries, Buddhists across much of Asia have released the sorrows born of sickness, hunger, and war through the simple, cathartic act of buying caged birds and setting them free. In front of the shimmering gold pagoda of Wat Phnom, erected on the wooded knoll that lent Phno
m Penh its name, Cambodian devotees reach inside the metal and wire mesh cages, draw out sparrows, swallows, munias, and weavers, often in pairs, and raise them in cupped palms to their lips. The adherents mumble a prayer and, often with a kiss, set them free into the warm, still air. But this tradition, in which devotees seek blessings for this life and the next, could now prove to be a curse. The lethal flu strain has been isolated from some of the wild species most commonly peddled outside the shrines of Buddhist Asia from Thailand to Taiwan. The hazards posed by the collection and release of these so-called merit birds is akin to that of live poultry markets.

  Kong Phalla has been selling merit birds from the cobblestone sidewalk at the base of Wat Phnom since she was eight. A slight woman in her twenties with small brown eyes, she had the familiar look of those who trade their childhood for the hustle of the street: a thin veneer of smarts overlaid on innocence. She approached me with a lotus stem in one hand and a cage crammed with birds in the other. She said the birds had been shipped into the capital overnight by riv erboat. She had already sold nearly three dozen to worshipers. “They want to free their depression, free their sadness and illness with the birds,” Kong Phalla explained. Her dark hair was tucked under a red knit cap despite the day’s gathering heat. She rested her load in the shade beside a table of incense sticks and flashed a weak smile, saying she had brought five cages to the pagoda that morning and was confident all one thousand birds would be sold by nightfall. The birds went for about fifty cents each, good money in Cambodia, though Kong Phalla got to keep only a tiny fraction. On holidays like Cambodia’s New Year, when business was especially brisk, she said, prices could triple.

  Bird flu was of no concern, Kong Phalla continued, patting the cage. It’s only the foreign tourists who fret. She snickered. “They’ll only open the doors of the cages and ask me to release the birds myself so they don’t have to touch them,” she said, adding with a boast, “Bird flu has never happened to me.”