The Fatal Strain (22 page)

But Shortridge maintains that even this great influenza of 1918 has a Chinese pedigree. Part of his proof is in the antibodies. Citing the medical accounts of an American missionary working in Guangdong at the time, Shortridge notes that Chinese children born after 1907 appeared to have a heightened immunity to the virus when the full-blown epidemic hit, suggesting they had already been exposed to a less virulent version of the same strain. “The virus had been smoldering in southern China for at least eleven years before it appeared,” he told me. Skeptics of his theory point out that the first wave of pandemic was recorded in the United States and Europe early in 1918, several months before it was documented in China. Yet Shortridge says this disregards the little-appreciated nature of flu in tropical climes like
southern China. There, flu is primarily a summer malady, not a winter one, and would not have fully manifested itself until the middle of 1918 even if the pandemic strain was already circulating locally. So how, then, would the virus have found its way to Europe? Shortridge says he discovered a possible explanation by accident. While listening to a program about World War I, he unexpectedly heard the sound of Chinese. It was the taped voices of economic migrants who had set off for the European front to dig trenches for the Allied forces. He recognized their dialect. It was Cantonese, the dialect from around Guangdong.

 

 

 

Four centuries ago, it was a change in farming techniques that consolidated southern China as the world’s influenza epicenter. The introduction of ducks into paddies boosted agricultural productivity and set the conditions in which novel strains could smolder. But in the last generation, it’s all been about demand. Much of East Asia has witnessed a population explosion of chickens, ducks, and pigs in response to the region’s rapidly rising incomes. More money has meant a greater appetite for meat, milk, and eggs to complement and even replace the traditional staple crops. And nowhere has more money come more quickly than in East Asia. These countries, often benefiting from open market policies and tremendous Japanese investment, have achieved unrivaled growth as manufacturing exports have eclipsed rubber and rice at the heart of the economy. Steel and glass have thrust into urban skies from Shanghai and Guangzhou to Bangkok and Jakarta, attesting to the region’s ambitions.

Since China began adopting market reforms in 1978, it has consistently recorded annual growth rates of more than 10 percent, raising living standards and reducing poverty as never before in history. The Beijing government turned much of this raw energy southward toward the marshes and paddies of the Pearl River delta. By establishing a special economic zone in Guangdong, China unleashed what author Karl Taro Greenfeld labeled the “greatest mass urbanization in the history of the world.” The province became the world’s workshop, “where more of everything is being made than has ever been made
anywhere at any time.” China now manufactures enough televisions to replace the world’s supply every two years and a quarter of everything sold at Walmart. Guangdong became China’s richest province, the boomtown of Shenzhen its richest city.

Yet for a decade after 1985, Thailand actually outpaced China and registered the fastest growth on Earth. No longer was the sex trade Bangkok’s main calling card. The capital built cavernous shopping malls, a hot fashion industry, and a sleek commuter Sky Train to whisk its young professionals among their high-rise office towers. Then it was Vietnam’s turn, emerging for a time as the fastest growing country in Southeast Asia by capitalizing on the Communist Party’s
Doi Moi
economic reforms. As growth rates topped more than 8 percent a year, storefronts along the romantic, tree-lined streets of Hanoi overflowed with iPods, computers, and digital cameras, and young Vietnamese plotted an even brighter future, expressing far greater admiration for Bill Gates than for anyone in their Politburo. Indonesia, in the meantime, diversified an economy long dependent on exports of oil, teak, and minerals, gaining recognition as a major newly industrialized country. The government in Jakarta eradicated much of the country’s poverty while motorbikes and cell phones became de rigueur even for many in the working class.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 temporarily knocked the wind out of this fabulous progress. But the region’s economies rebounded, albeit some faster than others. Incomes and ambitions resumed their ascent. Malaysia, always one of the region’s best performers, pressed ahead with the completion of its Petronas Twin Towers in downtown Kuala Lumpur and boasted they were the tallest buildings on the planet. (As measured to the tips of their spires, a controversial standard, they were.) The towers were a pair of exclamation marks rising above Asia’s transformed landscape.

To a casual visitor, the agricultural changes that have accompanied this era of remarkable growth may not be as visible as the city lights. But as economist Christopher Delgado from the International Food Policy Research Institute and his fellow authors wrote, “The demand-driven Livestock Revolution is one of the largest structural shifts ever to affect food markets in developing countries. . . .” The revolution is
not limited to East Asia. It has been manifest across much of the developing world as rising incomes, rapid population growth, and the broader diet that comes with urbanization combine to stoke demand for animal protein. During the two decades that followed 1980, people in developing countries doubled the average amount of meat they ate. By 1995 the volume of meat produced in developing countries for the first time surpassed that in developed ones.

But this is mostly because of China and Southeast Asia. China alone has accounted for more than half the developing world’s total increase in meat output. A large majority of that has been poultry products and pork, with the production of chicken meat growing fastest. The radical expansion of flocks that began in the 1970s and 1980s continued into the following decades, barely pausing for the East Asian financial crisis. From 1990 through 2005, China’s production of chicken nearly quadrupled, as did that of duck and goose. The amount of pork more than doubled.

Southeast Asia’s record ranks second only to that of China. During the same fifteen-year period, Indonesia more than tripled its production of chicken meat, Vietnam and Malaysia more than doubled theirs, and Thailand, which had registered a breathtaking growth of 10 percent annually in earlier decades, saw its output of chicken slow, increasing a mere 60 percent over this period. Malaysia more than doubled its output of duck and goose while Vietnam more than tripled its pork. To get a sense of the sweep of this revolution, consider the case of the Indonesian egg. In 1970, just as Indonesia’s long-slumbering economy was preparing to embark on a generation of sustained growth, the government statistics agency reported that the annual production of eggs was 59,000 tons. Three decades later, the total was 783,000 tons—a thirteenfold increase.

This transformation has literally put a chicken in every middle-class pot. Many among the urban poor have also secured better diets as meat prices dropped. (Consumers, fortunately, did not face the kind of inflated prices for grain and vegetables due to rising demand for animal feed that some economists had predicted.) But across vast swaths of rural Asia, the record is more mixed. Some small-time
farmers have proven unable to compete with new industrial producers and lost their livelihoods. Others, by contrast, have found that livestock, one of the few sectors they could afford to enter, was their ticket out of poverty. For Prathum, the revolution was a bonanza—until the virus discovered the same thing.

 

 

 

Prathum’s wife said the livestock officers stormed into Banglane like marauding communists. “They came by the hundreds in trucks, bringing soldiers and prisoners to kill the chickens. We argued for some time. But they weren’t listening to us,” Samrouy Buaklee recounted. She raised her leathery hands in exasperation and then wiped her deep brown eyes with the checkered scarf around her neck. “It broke my heart. I felt that the chickens were like my children.”

Samrouy had retreated in tears to the house deep in the rice paddies and remained sequestered there, alone, for two days. When she returned, she noticed the silence. It’s always the silence. Over and over, farmers who lost their flocks told me it was the absence of the cackling and cooing they found hardest to bear. The village had gone dark. Farmhouse lights that once flickered on in predawn hours as villagers awoke to tend their flocks remained extinguished. The roads were abandoned. “No one walked around,” her husband recalled. “Everybody sat at home and nobody talked. With the chickens gone, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.”

After more than half a year, Prathum decided to restock, rebuilding his flock though not his confidence. When I met him, his brown eyes had grown heavy, and bags hung low on broad, sunbaked cheeks. “Even if we’re afraid of the disease returning, what can we do? Nothing. We can’t run away,” he said softly. “It’s my job. If I don’t do chicken farming, what else can I do?”

Prathum left the question hanging. He rose from the wood crate where he’d been resting in the barn and emptied a sack of chicken feed into a wheelbarrow. Emerging into the morning light, he pushed it down a short concrete causeway jutting into the fishpond and trudged past a pair of spirit houses, those colorful, birdhouse-size
shrines on pedestals he had once hoped would keep the local spirits content. At the end of the causeway, three open-sided chicken sheds on stilts extended across the green water. Prathum started with one on the left, the hum from hundreds of excited hens rising to greet him. He stepped nimbly along the aging wood planks that ran between the cages, his meaty hands shoveling grain from a bucket into the long feeding trays. The plaid shirt hanging from his stocky frame was soiled and his bare feet were caked with dirt. The planks were stained with droppings, the air rank with a cocktail of feathers, feed, and feces.

As a concession to new government rules, Prathum had draped fishnet along the sides of the two sheds. This was meant to keep out wildfowl, which could be carrying bird flu. But mice had already gnawed holes in the netting, and a few crows and swallows were darting about under the corrugated metal roofs. That was the extent of Prathum’s effort to prevent contamination and stem another outbreak.

The most important line of defense against a human pandemic is not at the hospital or vaccine lab but at the farmyard gate. A single gram of bird feces can contain up to 10 billion virus particles. A speck on a heel or a pant leg or a bucket or a tire can introduce an infection capable of decimating a whole flock.

Health officials have long made clear how to prevent epidemic contagion from spreading among flocks or from farm to market and on to other farms. The first principle is to severely restrict access to poultry flocks. This means keeping chicken sheds off-limits to most visitors. Those raising birds of their own must be categorically banned. The second is strict hygiene. Anyone entering a shed should wash his hands and don sanitized shoes. Poultry workers should change into clean, disinfected clothes and take them off when they leave so they can be washed. Feeding pans and cages should be cleansed daily. Equipment, such as pallets and egg crates, are easily contaminated and should never be shared among farms. Vehicles that have visited other farms could inadvertently be carrying the seeds of disaster and should be kept at a distance. Other animals must be barred from the chicken sheds.

When Prathum’s black dachshund trotted after him into the
henhouse and then curled up for a nap beneath the cages, I knew there was trouble.

Nirundorn Aungtragoolsuk, a director of disease control in Thailand’s livestock department, later confirmed as much. He told me the government had adopted strict regulations, including a requirement that poultry workers shower with disinfectant before entering a farm and vehicles be sprayed with disinfectant before arriving on premises, but these applied solely to the large, export-oriented operations. The regulations were not meant for most farms, like Prathum’s. “They have done it their way for a long time and we cannot change it overnight,” Nirundorn said.

It took Prathum half an hour to finish feeding the hens in the three sheds. He returned to the barn, sweat glistening under his thinning hair, and hopped on his Honda motorbike. With a sack of feed in the sidecar, he buzzed up his gravel driveway, across the road, and down a dirt track that paralleled a canal on the far side. His other dog, a white crossbreed, had joined the dachshund, and now the pair gave chase, scampering behind Prathum until he reached two more chicken sheds suspended above another pond. As he resumed his feeding rounds, the dogs followed him inside.

A few moments later, as he emerged to fetch more feed, a silver Isuzu pickup coated with dirt pulled up right at the entrance to the sheds. It was the neighbors. The husband, Monchai, had bad teeth, and his wife, Boonsveb, had big hair. But they also had three times as many chickens as Prathum. They had culled the whole lot when the flu erupted and replaced them all. They told Prathum they had an uneasy feeling about another outbreak and wanted to compare notes. The talk turned to the question of whether they should erect modern, all enclosed, climate-controlled sheds.

“Of course that would be better,” the wife said. “It would keep out disease. But it’s expensive.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Prathum agreed. “Who can afford it?”

“You certainly can’t afford it,” the husband quipped, needling Prathum. “You can’t even afford enough staff. You have to do the farming yourself.”

As if on cue, Prathum refilled his bucket and vanished deep into
the chicken shed again. The husband, wearing cracked, dirty sandals, accompanied him inside. The dogs took up the rear as hundreds of red-crested heads poked out of the cages, viewing the procession.

Shortly after the neighbors left, another Isuzu pickup, this one red, rumbled down Prathum’s gravel driveway, pulling up in a cloud of dust just outside the barn. The cab door opened. Out got Nikon Inmaee, an egg vendor with a narrow face and short, wavy hair. Prathum had collected the eggs in the hours just after dawn, and now they were waiting, packed into plastic trays stacked ten high amid dirt and dead grass on the barn’s concrete floor.