The Fatal Strain Read online

  This globalized age offers untold firepower for fighting disease. It was via the Internet, for example, that some of the earliest rumors about SARS in southern China found their way to WHO, and the intense scrutiny of global media made it untenable for Beijing to keep the secret indefinitely. The agency’s virtual lab network wired together the world’s leading scientists as never before. Public health officials, even in poor, far-flung corners of the world like Mongolia and Vietnam, were quick to learn how to recognize, treat, and contain the disease with guidance from foreign reinforcements.

  Yet for all the advances of this era, someone still has to grab the bird and swab its underside. There is no substitute for the grunt work of influenza field research.

  Guan had continued to expand the sampling program that he launched with the lab at Shantou University Medical College. By 2005 he had about eighty people working for him, quietly collecting specimens every week from poultry and wild birds in seven provinces of southern China and Hong Kong. He had tapped into an old-boy network that dated as far back as Jiangxi, locally recruiting what he called his band of heroes. “They’re very brave,” he said. It wasn’t just the health risk. Most had some background in veterinary studies or health care, so they knew how to take proper samples and protect themselves from infection. It was also politics. The Chinese government was wary of this outside meddling and at times tried to block it. But using the cultural smarts he’d developed as a boy, Guan helped win his staff access to poultry markets across the vast belly of China even as officials grew increasingly uncomfortable with the extent of infection his program was uncovering. He demurred when I pressed him for more details. “This is a kind of top-secret weapon, a top-secret system.”

  The logistics of maintaining this network were almost beyond Guan’s ability. The financial burden of paying the staff was tremendous. “They are working for the good of China, working for the good of Hong Kong, working for the rest of the world,” he kept telling himself. But the sampling of more than two hundred thousand birds over nearly a decade yielded an unrivalled library of ever-mutating influenza viruses. It came to represent the most comprehensive accounting of the pandemic threat, in essence an early-warning system for the world.

  Guan told me in late 2007 that his research showed the virus was now smoldering in poultry across much of Asia, waiting to flare up. China had ordered a massive campaign to vaccinate chickens against bird flu, as had Vietnam and Indonesia. While this had helped curtail poultry outbreaks in many places and reduced the overall level of infection in birds, the practice had not eliminated the pathogen altogether. Birds were still spreading it but without overt symptoms. “The virus is covered up,” he warned. “We’re giving the virus a chance. Now the virus can travel freely and undetectably and easily be transmitted.”

  Many in government and media had mistaken silence for peace.

  “Because we don’t have a pandemic today,” he said, “don’t accuse of us of crying wolf.”

  Guan had been at his apartment watching television on Boxing Day 2003 when his wife called. Though the day after Christmas was a legal holiday in Hong Kong, she had gone in to work, where she’d heard a disturbing report. After a half-year hiatus, there was a new suspected case of SARS in China.

  Guan was not surprised. The Chinese government had reopened the wild-game markets months earlier despite his objections. The world’s concern over the disease had waned but not Guan’s. He had continued sampling wild animals. He had even expanded his effort beyond Shenzhen to cover other markets across Guangdong province. His findings were alarming. Not only was he discovering the SARS Coronavirus in most of the civets he tested; he was also turning up evidence of infection in a wider range of species than before. When he learned in December that a Chinese television producer had been hospitalized with the disease and been put into isolation, Guan knew what he’d have to do.

  A week later, he met with senior Guangdong health officials at a Guangzhou hotel to argue his case. The civets had to be slaughtered. Guan was emotional, perhaps too emotional. The officials were skeptical of his judgment and resisted such a radical recommendation. The trade in wild animals was worth at least $100 million a year to the provincial economy. But when Guan had them compare the genetic signature of the virus from the ailing journalist with the one he had isolated from civets, they were stunned to see that the two were practically identical.

  Later that day, the governor of Guangdong ordered that all civets on the farms and in the markets of the province be culled. Though three more human cases would surface in Guangdong that month, the outbreak would be rapidly contained. WHO credited Guan for helping preempt a second SARS epidemic.

  “Before it got into humans, I knew it was coming, but other people said I was crying wolf,” he recounted. “After the first case, I said, ‘Let’s use direct scientific information to stop the outbreak.’ So it was averted.”

  Guan now finds himself playing a prophetic role again. To anyone who listens, he says the moral of SARS is clear. The flu virus must be controlled in birds. Whatever it takes, the microbial agent must be extinguished before a readily transmissible flu strain jumps to people, because once it does, global spread is inevitable. There won’t be time to stop it.

  But he laments that his counsel is again being shunned. Only now, with the flu virus so widespread, it could be too late.

  “I did my job,” he said, rising to light another Mild Seven. “I can face God and say, ‘OK, God, this mission I did. I gave all this advance warning. I provided evidence. I did everything a scientist could do. The remaining job is for governments and politicians. And each person must pay the price if they go against the laws of nature.’ ”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cockfighting and Karma

  The pair of Thai fighting cocks, long-legged and elegant, stalked each other around the dirt ring, feinting and probing for an opening. They puffed out their broad chests, flaunting their foot-tall physiques. Then they each settled into a brief crouch, face-to-face, beak to razor-sharp beak. As they spread the majestic plumage around their necks, electricity coursed through the arena with anticipation of first blood.

  Generations of breeding had brought the prizefighters to this moment of steely, instinctive, hard-wired aggression, nurtured and shaped by hundreds of hours of training.

  They attacked as one, lunging at each other through the air, colliding in midflight with the muffled thud of meat on meat and the frantic flapping of ruffled wings and tails.

  Spectators leaped from their concrete-block bleachers, surging against the edge of the ring.

  Feathers flew. Blood oozed from the wounded eye of one combatant, a lean, handsome rooster with rich black plumage and golden brown along the neck and back. Even more was flowing from the throat of his adversary, an equally graceful creature with a white body and black trim along the wings and tail. His neck was quickly staining red.

  Cries swelled in the bleachers as the spectators doubled and redoubled their wagers like frenzied traders on the floor of a stock exchange. Phapart Thieuviharn, a lifelong cock breeder with intense brown eyes and straight black hair speckled with gray, shifted anxiously on the edge of his seat, clutching the notepad on which he had scribbled his bets. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars in Thai baht would ultimately change hands once one of the roosters finally surrendered to its injuries.

  But Phapart and 125 other spectators were wagering more than their banknotes. They were gambling with their lives. In the years since bird flu began racing across Southeast Asia, cockfighting has repeatedly been implicated as a killer. It has sickened cock breeders and enthusiasts from Thailand to Vietnam and spread the virus on to Malaysia and perhaps even to Indonesia through the smuggled exports of prized fighting birds.

  Cockfighting has long been a prominent feature of rural Southeast Asia, intertwined with its history, a spectacle for kings and peasants alike. For centuries, it seemed to pose no human threat but was just one more tradition that wove tog
ether the lives of man and bird into the fiber of daily existence. Villagers shared their homes with their chickens, peddled poultry at live markets, and integrated wildfowl into religious rituals. But these traditions, benign for humans if not the birds, have lately acquired a sinister edge. They have proven largely impervious to the admonitions of public health officials, who have urgently warned that the practice could unlock flu’s devastating potential.

  In fundamental ways, modernity has recast this corner of the world, unleashing dramatic economic changes that have magnified the potential for a pandemic strain and weaving the region into a globalized planet now exposed as never before to viral threats born of Asia. Yet Asia’s past could also be mankind’s undoing if age-old conventions give the virus entrée into the human population. Time and again, the intimate contact between fighting cocks and their doting breeders has proven a fatal attraction. Even for spectators at the cockpit, the brew of rooster blood, breath, and mucus that sprayed the ringside could be lethal.

  Yet flu seemed of little matter on this sultry Sunday when Phapart had agreed to take me to the fights. We had driven about forty miles from his home in the northern Thai province of Phayao, where the sport had been banned because of public health concerns, to neighboring Chiang Rai province, where it was still allowed. But gambling was not. So local villagers thought it prudent to build their arena away from the main roads, far from the inquisitive eyes and outstretched palms of law enforcement. We turned off the paved road and headed down a long, unmarked dirt track that stretched deep into the emerald rice paddies until we reached a clearing. Though barely midday, the dirt and grass lot was already filling up with dusty pickup trucks. A young man collected fifty cents from Phapart. By midafternoon, the attendant would net about two hundred dollars in parking fees.

  We walked over to what Phapart called the stadium. It was actually a whole cockfighting complex, a cluster of open-sided sheds with thatch and corrugated metal roofs. The main events were held in the central arena, a twenty-foot-diameter pit with red padding along the sides surrounded by three rows of concrete bleachers and a fourth fashioned from bamboo. Side matches were staged in three smaller rings without any seating. Food stalls peddled Thai noodles, soup, and other simple dishes.

  The matchmaking had already started. Several dozen men, looking for action, had carried over roosters in woven bamboo cages and set them down near the entrance. There they sized up the competition, judging the other birds for weight and size, the other owners for the depth of their pockets.

  A middle-aged farmer in a plaid work shirt had struck a match with a teenager in a red soccer T-shirt, and they shook hands on the first bout. Their birds, the black rooster with golden brown patches and the white rooster with black trim, each weighed in at about five pounds. Their base wager, sure to escalate over the course of the bout, would open at thirty-three hundred baht, or slightly more than eighty dollars. The fight organizer wrote their names on a blackboard outside the main arena, Golf Chai versus Mae Yao, and dispatched them to their corners.

  For fifteen minutes, they prepped their fighters. Like trainers at a boxing match, they massaged the roosters to loosen their muscles. They wiped down the birds with moist towels warmed on a portable gas stove. The white rooster had somehow lost a wing feather. So his teenage owner, determined that his bird be properly accoutred, produced a spare white plume and glued it in place.

  The spectators, mainly men from surrounding districts, filed into the arena, claiming spots on the bleachers. Those on the far side were silhouetted against brilliant sunshine. But beneath the metal roof, the ring was shady and cool. The stadium workers distributed small note-pads to the crowd so they could record their bets, and the scribbling began even before the referee barked the fight to a start. With a few words of whispered encouragement, the owners released their impatient, agitated birds into the ring.

  The roosters strutted and stalked, and then they struck. Over and over they flung themselves at one another. They craned their lissome necks, red crowns high, and jousted with their beaks. They jabbed and kicked with the daggerlike spurs on their legs. Resolute and reckless, beautiful and brutal. First blood was just that, only the first. This fight was scheduled to go two rounds, twenty relentless minutes each, and toward the end of the opening round, their fine, well-groomed feathers were growing ragged and red from combat.

  The spectators had crowded the lowest rows and were now hanging on every thrust and parry. Dozens leaned forward into the ring, their arms dangling at times within inches of the action. They scrutinized the rivals for a glimmer of doubt or weakness, a slight hesitation or momentary loss of heart that could presage final retreat sometime later on. The betting swelled, with the crowd barking out side bets across the ring almost as fast as they could jot them in their pads.

  Two hundred baht. Five hundred baht! One thousand baht! Two thousand baht!!

  When the referee called an end to the first round, the two owners rushed into the ring, swept their roosters up into their arms, and hustled them away. There was much to be done during the break.

  On adjacent patches of dirt, the two owners followed the same, urgent regimen. First they scrubbed the blood from the birds. Clutching soggy rags in their bare hands, they firmly washed the roosters’ faces, followed by their necks, stomachs, and legs, repeatedly wringing out the bloody cloths on the dirt. Next they slipped the birds painkillers to help get them through the final round, prying open their beaks and popping in pills with their fingers. Each owner then grabbed a spare feather and inserted it into his cock’s mouth, twisting it in the throat to help clear blood and mucus. They withdrew the feather and ran it between their fingers, squeezing the slime onto the ground. Then they repeated the procedure.

  As we joined the small circle of onlookers, Phapart explained that bruising and internal bleeding can become so painful that an owner must nick the swelling with a knife and suck out the blood with his mouth. Some owners have been known to remove excess mucus the same way. They do what it takes to keep the cocks in the game. “If the beak breaks loose from the mouth during a fight,” he continued, “you can reattach it with a small net wrapped around the head and then begin fighting again. If a claw breaks off, you can bandage it. If the wing feathers are loose, you can glue them back on.”

  In the boxing matches of the West, prizefighters often rely on a “cut man” in their corner to help stanch bleeding from around the eyes so they can tough out another round. Since roosters are no better at battling blind, cockfighting has a similar craft. On this afternoon, the eyes of both birds were swelling shut. So in the final minutes of the break, the two men produced needles and thread and deftly stitched their roosters’ eyes open.

  The referee summoned the competitors for the second round. Their owners, now smeared with blood and mucus and bird droppings, returned the patched-up cocks to the ring. There, they resumed the brawl where they had left it.

  When the climax came, toward the end of the round, it came quickly. The white rooster had been stripped of more and more feathers and ultimately of his confidence. The spectators immediately noticed this tentative turn, and the sound of cheers and jeers swelled in the bleachers. Those few who were still seated jumped to their feet.

  The black-and-gold aggressor continued his pursuit, pressing his advantage, pushing his foe up against the side of the ring. Attacking over and over. The white rooster was broken, its spirit finally crushed. In a wholly unfamiliar act that betrayed his very nature, he scampered away in retreat. A holler rose from the crowd.

  This unforgiving competition is an acute form of natural selection. Losers perish in the ring or become supper for their owners. Winners prevail to fight another day and, if they win enough, go on to father the next generation of fighters.

  “This the best way to breed,” said Apichai Ratanawaraha, an agriculture professor at Bangkok’s Thammasat University and a scholar of this blood sport. “You get the best of the best. Because Thai people in the countryside have s
elected their birds this way for generations, the fighting cock breed in Thailand may be the best in the world.”

  Cockfighting spread centuries ago to Europe and onward to the Caribbean and Latin America. The fighting cock has transcended cultures as a symbol of virility and manhood. But the sport’s roots are in Asia.

  Apichai told me that the peoples of East Asia have been raising chickens as gamecocks for just as long as they have been raising them for food: about 7,500 years. It was in Southeast Asia that mankind first domesticated chicken, most likely in Thailand itself. The poultry found today on farms across the world are descended from the region’s red jungle fowl, wild pheasants with golden bronze plumage draping the necks, wings, and backs and with black chests and tails that shimmer blue and green. The male of the species is much larger than the female, with a fleshy red wattle on his head and, during breeding season, an intense dislike for rival suitors. Early farmers found that pitting the males against one another made for a welcome diversion from the slog of subsistence agriculture, a way to unwind during the weeks after the harvest was finally in. “Cockfighting,” Apichai claimed, “was the first sport for human beings.”