Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

Writing a century later, another Westerner who devoted his career to medical inquiry in Hong Kong determined that China was the “epicenter” of all influenza viruses. Kennedy Shortridge has been one of the world’s premier scholars of flu, a lanky Australian with thick, graying eyebrows and a deep melodious voice. He spent three decades as a microbiologist in Hong Kong before retiring to New Zealand. His research pinpoints southern China, and in particular the Pearl River delta of Guangdong province, adjacent to Hong Kong, as the cradle of the world’s flu. He noted that the natural hosts for flu viruses are aquatic birds, harboring the microbes in their guts, with ducks playing a unique and leading role. Before the rise of China’s Qing dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century, duck herders grazed their flocks along riverbanks and in canals and other waterways. But that changed in response to a mounting problem with pests in the rice paddies of southern China. Ducks were introduced into the paddies and fed on the insects and snails. When rice plants started to sprout, the flocks were temporarily rotated elsewhere. This elegantly balanced agrarian system made ducks far more profitable, and their population soared. With as many as five rice harvests annually in Guangdong, ducks became a year-round presence in the densely populated villages of the delta, and duck droppings, often larded with virus, became ubiquitous. Pigs snuffed up the fecal matter, offering themselves as a natural laboratory for gene swapping, because they can contract both bird and human flu viruses at the same time. Contagion was everywhere, Shortridge observed. It was a recipe for repeated epidemic.

The flu pandemic of 1957 is known as the Asian flu. Western countries learned of it after it was identified in Singapore. But Shortridge told me the strain had actually been isolated earlier in China’s southern Guizhou province. The 1968 pandemic was dubbed the Hong Kong flu. Yet Shortridge asserts that this, too, arose first on the mainland, specifically Guangdong, but the mainland Chinese were too preoccupied with the Cultural Revolution to take note. Hong Kong was just about the only conduit out at the time. It caught the bug and lent its name.

The origin of the 1918 Spanish flu is a matter of greater dispute. All agree the epidemic did not start in Spain. It only took this name because the Spanish were willing to report it. Unlike the United States and the European powers embroiled at the time in World War I, Spain was neutral and did not censor news deemed to undercut morale. Spain broke with their policy of censoring news about the outbreak. The flu made headlines in Spain, and eventually the press in other countries picked up reports of this “Spanish” flu.

American author John Barry has made a strong case for Haskell County, Kansas, as the origin of the pandemic. He cites medical reports as evidence of an extraordinary flu outbreak there in early 1918 and describes how the county’s young men would have reported to an army camp three hundred miles to the east before being deployed with their germs to the European front. British virologist John S. Oxford, by contrast, has postulated that the scourge first arose at a mammoth British army camp in northern France, where many soldiers had been treated in 1916 for what was then diagnosed as acute purulent bronchitis. Oxford’s review of those clinical findings concluded that the outbreak was actually pandemic flu.

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.