The Fatal Strain Page 18

  Separate studies of the bird flu epidemic in Thai poultry had also deeply implicated free-ranging ducks. The research showed that outbreaks in the chicken population were concentrated in areas where ducks commonly graze, primarily wetland areas of intensive rice cultivation. Suphan Buri was singled out as a hot spot for disease. By contrast, provinces with high concentrations of chickens but few ducks largely escaped the brunt of the epidemic. The authors suggested that paddies were a likely meeting point where migratory water birds relayed contagion to ducks, which in turn infected chickens before shuttling it to other fields and provinces.

  Sangwan said his rambling took him through the rice paddies of more than ten provinces over the course of a season. Every two or three days he moved on, generally drifting southward with the harvest. Only hours earlier, after exhausting the pickings in a nearby field, he had herded his flock to a new paddy, where young rice plants were just starting to poke through the still surface. “I marched them here like little soldiers. ‘Keep walking,’ I told them. ‘Keep walking.’ ” He gestured with his open palms to show how he nudged them along, a smile settling on his stubbly face and crow’s-feet deepening at the corners of his eyes. The ducks had filed down the grassy banks into the water, waddling and ruffling their tail feathers. A flotilla set sail with a whoosh toward a low line of palms on the distant shore. Sangwan had claimed a rare sliver of shade on the dike. He lay down his long bamboo rod and stretched out his scrawny legs.

  At the end of the day, Sangwan and his wife would line the birds up again and march them back to the campsite. The ducks spent their nights in a temporary enclosure of plastic sheeting. Sangwan looked for a dry patch of earth to pitch his tent. “I’ve gotten used to living in the open fields,” he said. “I love spending the time with the ducks rather than in a house, where you have to hear a television and people talking and traffic on the street.” In the hours before dawn, he would listen to his charges rustle as they scouted for comfortable nooks to lay their eggs. “That’s a nice sound,” he mused. “That’s the sound of making money.”

  Sangwan had turned to herding two decades earlier as the livestock revolution was accelerating, doubling and redoubling Thailand’s duck production. As a younger man, he had dabbled in construction, growing rice, and raising vegetables. He took up singing after winning a local contest. Later, dead broke, he persuaded his uncle to teach him about ducks. He learned how to call to them in an authoritative voice so they’d respect and obey him. But alone on the dikes, Sangwan still serenaded his flocks with ballads of rural heartbreak.

  Lowering his cigarette to his side, his melancholy voice began to carry across the glistening paddies, rising above the soft swooshing sound of birds foraging in the water.

  I am looking at the rice fields at harvest time.

  I feel so lonesome thinking of you, my darling.

  I used to hold my sickle harvesting with you each year.

  But now things will never be the same . . .

  He returned the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag. His sunken cheeks slipped even deeper into shadow. Then he continued.

  Oh, my dear, did you forget your promise?

  You asked me to wait for you these three years.

  But you seem to have forgotten our homeland.

  Oh, where are you right now?

  He paused again, briefly, eyes lowered.

  Have you been seduced by life in the big city?

  Have you forgotten our land of farms?

  Or are you ashamed because someone cheated you in love?

  Is that why you’re not coming back home to me?

  When he finished, Sangwan drew a bag of tobacco from the pocket of his baggy shirt and began rolling another cigarette. He fretted that the best days seemed to be over. Thai officials were already threatening to restrict the movement of ducks from one village to another. He could never afford to raise his flock in a closed shelter, he said. The feed bill would bankrupt him and the ducks would rebel.

  After the government first floated the idea in late 2004, Sangwan had experimented with confining the ducks to a shed beside his house. It lasted a week. “I felt restless because the ducks couldn’t walk around and they didn’t have enough food,” he recounted. “The ducks were not happy.” That was bad news for business because, he confided to me, ducks are like pregnant women. They need to be pampered or they get nervous and lay their eggs prematurely. “I feel like I have a thousand little wives,” he said, a grin briefly breaking through. “When the ducks get tense, I get tense.”

  To protest the proposed farming regime, his wife had led hundreds of peasants to the provincial capital. They besieged a government building for three hours, accusing officials of acting arbitrarily and sowing needless anxiety. “When the government says ducks carry bird flu, it just makes people panic,” Sangwan complained, growing agitated. “It’s not true that ducks get the flu. For twenty years I’ve been raising ducks and I’ve never seen one get bird flu.”

  In the months after I met Sangwan, the Thai government would bar farmers from transporting their flocks from one region to another and eventually, in 2006, place a total ban on duck grazing. Thailand’s initiative sputtered, but the country ultimately achieved more than neighbors like Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, where duck herding remains common. When flu outbreaks unexpectedly erupted across more than a dozen provinces of northern Vietnam in 2007 after a long period of quiet, sickening people in the country for the first time in eighteen months, ducks were implicated. A special investigation blamed the epidemic on a dramatic influx of young ducks into the paddies of the Red River delta. By contrast, many of the estimated 10 million free-range ducks in Thailand were ultimately slaughtered or moved indoors.

  But even there, compliance was spotty. Some Thai duck herders continued to follow the cycle of the crops as they had for generations, thwarting efforts to snuff out the disease. It had been several harvests since I met Sangwan when I heard about a group of herders who’d illegally moved three flocks with as many as fifteen thousand birds into the fields of Kanchanaburi province, just west of Suphan Buri. The chickens in several local villages began to die within two weeks. When those near the home of a peasant named Bang-on Benphat started to fall sick and collapse, the forty-eight-year-old man butchered them for dinner. His young son helped pluck the feathers. Both soon developed a fever and lung infections. Bang-on was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. Two days later he died, a casualty of flu.

  Prathum sat cross-legged on his back porch, surveying all that he and his chickens had built. His eyes panned past across the barn and the sheds, where his amply nourished hens were settling in for the afternoon, past the fish ponds, where a fleeting fin glinted amid the vines of morning glory, toward a line of trees casting long shadows at the edge of his property.

  His thoughts returned to those new, modern chicken shelters that farmers were chattering more about. They were called evap houses, short for evaporative cooling houses. They had automatic ventilation and used large fans and water to maintain mild temperatures even during intense tropical heat. Because they were enclosed, they could keep out most contagion. “Even insects can’t get in,” he noted, impressed. But the cost was tremendous. He would need a loan and have to quadruple the size of his flock to make the numbers work. He would need at least five years to break even. No need to be hasty, he reasoned.

  “I’m not worried right now,” he put it to me. “We haven’t heard anything lately about the epidemic. Maybe the disease left with our last lot of chickens. The new ones all look healthy.”

  His wife appeared in the doorway with a watermelon. She wasn’t buying his cool assurance. “I’m definitely afraid the disease will come back to this area,” she offered. “Some people say the disease came with the wind. Some say it came with birds. We have no clear idea. And deep down, he’s still worried about it, too.” She glared at Prathum, then laughed.

  “Yes, I’m still scared,” he confessed. “But I try not to show it. W
hat can I do? We’d never had bird flu before. It just came. I’m hoping it won’t come again.”

  Prathum took the watermelon from his wife. He grabbed a knife from the bench and started carving the fruit.

  His sons were urging him to invest in an evap house, he told me without looking up. It was all that fancy university education. His older son, the one studying veterinary science, he’d even visited several evap houses to check them out. But Prathum had seen enough change in his life.

  “I may not be able to learn as fast as young people,” Prathum said. “I’ll retire after a while and pass the farm on to my son. Then, he can do what he wants.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  From a Single Spark

  Professor Yi Guan gingerly placed the small cooler box with its mysterious contents into his black canvas satchel. He covered the box with a towel, then a newspaper, to conceal it from prying eyes. He wasn’t quite sure what he had. Whatever it was, it had already proven to be a ruthless killer. The cooler box contained about two dozen vials, and lurking inside each one, Guan feared, was enough biohazardous material to start a global epidemic. But the specimens could also be the world’s salvation—if only he could get them back to his laboratory in Hong Kong.

  Guan slung the strap of the satchel over the shoulder of his gray suit jacket and headed for the door of the hospital. The medical staff at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases had nervously collected the mucus specimens from the noses and throats of patients stricken by the strange plague now burning through China’s Guangdong province. The institute director, an esteemed scientist named Dr. Nanshan Zhong, had agreed that Guan could take the samples back to Hong Kong University for identification. But Guan had no such permission from the Chinese government. If he was stopped, he had no papers to show. If the vials were discovered, they could be confiscated and Guan detained. He could be held until his Beijing contacts vouched for him, if he was fortunate. If not, he could be accused of stealing state secrets or espionage and sentenced to life in a labor camp.

  Chinese officials were determined to keep the severity of the epidemic under wraps. That very morning, February 11, 2003, Guangzhou’s vice mayor had announced that the city was facing an outbreak of unusual pneumonia but it was under control and no extraordinary measures were required. But WHO was already picking up rumors of a far more serious outbreak involving a “strange contagious disease” that “left more than 100 people dead in Guangdong Province in the space of one week.”

  Guan suspected avian flu. Three months earlier, in November 2002, the wild birds of Hong Kong had started to die, first in the New Territories bordering Guangdong Province, then at a park in the teeming downtown of Kowloon. Samples from the outbreaks tested positive for the virus. Guan’s suspicions hardened in February when bird flu was detected in a Hong Kong family. They had been traveling in China’s Fujian province for the Chinese New Year when a young daughter came down with a severe respiratory illness. She had perished before the family returned home and was never tested for the virus. Soon her father and brother also fell sick and were hospitalized in Hong Kong. The father died. Both tested positive. It was the same H5N1 subtype that had first struck Hong Kong in 1997. They were the first confirmed cases anywhere since then.

  As a fledgling researcher, Guan had helped investigate the 1997 outbreak. He had been part of the team that uncovered the widespread infection among Hong Kong’s poultry, crucial information that helped energize the city’s decisive response. He believed a pandemic had been averted. Now he was trying to repeat the feat.

  As he left the Guangzhou institute, an aging seven-story gray cement edifice along the Pearl River, and set out to catch his Hong Kong-bound train, Guan felt time was running out. He feared that the next time the virus departed the province, it wouldn’t be in securely sealed vials nestled inside a carefully prepared cooler box but unknowingly in the lungs of a victim. Once it escaped southern China, he was afraid, moreover, that the pathogen would spread to dozens of countries. Finally, he was sure it would then take only days to reach the far side of the planet.

  Guan was tragically prescient on all three counts. The transformation of Asia over the previous generation had not only been internal, amplifying the hazards of an animal-born epidemic; but it had also redefined the region’s ties with the rest of a globalized world. And in this age, the magnitude of a pandemic threat was growing as the distance between its origin and the rest of the world was shrinking.

  Guan, however, was wrong about one thing.

  When Yi Guan was six years old, growing up in the impoverished Chinese province of Jiangxi, his sister changed his name. He had been born Qiu Ping Guan. Qiu meant “autumn,” the season of his birth. Ping meant “peaceful.” Guan was the family name.

  He was the youngest of three boys and two girls raised in the remote countryside about 180 miles from the provincial capital. In 1966, when Guan was four, Chairman Mao Zedong launched China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade of violent upheaval targeting those considered as capitalists, intellectuals, or vestiges of the former ruling class. Guan’s mother was descended from property. Though spared the worst excesses, his family was forced to subdivide its six-room house to make space for others. His father, an engineer, was sentenced to reeducation and put to work threshing flax plants to extract an ingredient for wine.

  One day, as Guan was preparing to enroll in first grade, his adult sister called him aside.

  “Come on, brother. I need to talk to you about something,” she said. She seemed unusually earnest.

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” the young Guan asked.

  “I want to give you a new name,” she responded. “You are the only boy in our whole family who has the hope to become successful. So I’m changing your name. It’s becoming Yi.”

  She wrote the name on a piece of paper. Guan couldn’t understand the significance. His sister said one of its meanings was “extraordinary.”

  “I picked this meaning to make you remember you must become outstanding, extraordinary,” she told him. “That is your duty.” She took him to school and registered him under his new name. It was a heavy burden, Guan later recalled. But he took his charge seriously.

  As part of his radical remaking of Chinese society, Mao had shuttered the colleges. But just as Guan was preparing to graduate from high school, China announced they would reopen. For nine months he crammed for the entrance exam. Less than 1 percent of high school students would make the cut, Guan recounted. He would be among them.

  Guan went on to study medicine and specialize in pediatrics, winning a place at an elite Beijing institute where he hooked up with a senior scientist specializing in infectious diseases of the respiratory system. He was later offered a slot in the PhD program at Hong Kong University and, after that, a chance to go overseas. He continued his research with one of the world’s top flu scholars, Dr. Robert Webster, at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

  Several years had passed when, on a Saturday morning in late November 1997, Webster called him. Guan had returned to Memphis hours earlier after defending his doctoral thesis in Hong Kong and visiting his aging mother for the first time in two years. “Don’t open your baggage,” Webster ordered him. Guan was to turn around and go back.

  “What happened?” Guan asked.

  “While you were in the sky crossing the Pacific,” Webster said, “they had three cases of H5N1.”

  “Really?” Guan was shouting excitedly over the telephone. “Really?”

  Webster instructed him to get his travel documents ready and prepare the biological materials he would need to transport to Hong Kong. They were going to join the virus hunt.

  Guan never gave up the chase. He soon moved back to Hong Kong to become a researcher in microbiology at the university and quickly went to work sampling the city’s birds. Before long, he would emerge as one of the world’s great collectors of flu viruses. Even as memories of the 1997 outbreak were fading, he w
as compiling data on myriad strains and amassing thousands of samples from birds in Hong Kong and southern China. In the summer of 2000, he had extended the net to Guangdong, establishing a virology lab at Shantou University Medical College. The facilities there had been idle for a decade. Guan spent a week cleaning the lab. He scrubbed the floor and washed the research bench and its protective hood. Only then did he set off to collect specimens from nearby poultry markets. Within two years, he had set up a network of field researchers that was gathering samples from birds in four provinces of southern China.

  Webster, his mentor, had helped recruit Guan to the post at Hong Kong University. Webster was convinced that the novel flu strain simmering in southern China posed a grave danger to the world and wanted someone, preferably a Chinese virologist with Western training, who’d be nothing less than bullheaded in tracking the evolving threat. “Yi doesn’t know the word no. He doesn’t take no from anyone,” Webster put it to me. “He believes in what he’s doing and he’s intellectually driven to do these things. He talks a million miles an hour, and a lot of it is not totally focused, but his overall mission is focused. You’ve got to have someone who is hard-driving to get out there and be able to interact with the people and understand the region, and he was the perfect person to do the surveillance.”

  Rumors of a bird flu epidemic among the Chinese of Guangdong first surfaced in November 2002. WHO’s influenza chief, Klaus Stohr, who would later mobilize the agency’s flu hunters after bird flu exploded in Vietnam in early 2004, was at a medical conference in Beijing when a health official from Guangdong stood up and described an especially nasty outbreak of respiratory disease among people of his province. “He talked about deaths, very severe disease and deaths,” Stohr recounted. Chinese doctors had been unable to identify the precise cause, but they said it looked a lot like flu. Stohr was inclined to agree. “I just put two and two together, and it added up,” he recalled. “I thought this must be H5N1 coming back in precisely the way we had feared. It was our worst nightmare, and the world’s.”