Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

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.

Prathum helped Nikon gingerly hoist the trays into the truck bed. Three days a week, Prathum’s eggs were ferried to Bangkok, but this batch was headed for a closer market, about fifteen miles away. While Prathum calculated the tab on a small pad, Nikon returned to the back of his truck and began pulling out a separate set of empty trays. He deposited dozens of them in the barn for use later in the week. They were still soiled from the market. It was like addicts swapping dirty needles.

There was a time in the United States when chicken was a luxury, an indulgence for those weary of more affordable dishes like lobster and steak. Chicken was precious because it was relatively rare. In the ninteenth century, raising poultry was little more than a hobby for farmers’ wives, and in 1880, when the U.S. Census started counting chickens, they numbered only 102 million nationwide. By 2006, that number were butchered nearly every four days.

This American revolution would have been impossible but for a series of advances in animal husbandry, starting with the debut of commercially sold chicks in the late nineteenth century. Next came the development of artificial hatcheries, which lowered prices and brought chickens to selling weight faster. Companies specializing in feed emerged. Vitamin D was introduced to fight rickets. Broilers and later layers were shifted indoors, where temperature, lighting, and diet could be precisely calibrated, and then the birds were raised off the ground and confined to tiers of wire cages, where care and feeding was even easier. But the watershed was the introduction in 1971 of a vaccine for a poultry plague called Marek’s disease, which was killing 60 percent of the birds. Chicken prices plummeted, further fueling American demand already on the rise for familiar reasons: population growth, increasing income, and urbanization.

In the United States, where chicken was fast replacing beef as the animal protein of choice, safety measures to prevent disease followed quickly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an aggressive campaign to educate farmers about biosecurity. Many family farms were swallowed by integrated agriculture companies, which insisted on stricter practices to protect their operations. In Europe, which was experiencing a similar chicken boom, many farmers had turned to banks for financing and inked contracts with feed mills. Both demanded measures to safeguard their investments.

Asia, for the most part, has yet to follow suit. So today, birds in China and Southeast Asia are amassed in once unimaginable densities, often weakened by their stressful confinement and exposed to the whims and wrath of viruses like influenza. The tremendous amounts of feed, water, and human traffic required to maintain these flocks offer a generous avenue to infection. In the unnatural setting of intensive agriculture, chickens are more vulnerable to contagion because they are pressed together and housed atop one another’s droppings, which are a main way, if not the main way, birds transmit the virus. A year after bird flu’s arrival in Thailand, a study found that Thai commercial farms were at a significantly higher risk of infection than the small, informal flocks of several dozen poultry that villagers have raised in their yards for centuries.

It’s not only the risks of infection on large farms that are greater. So are the consequences. The lack of genetic diversity in many commercial flocks means that a virus that infects one bird can likely infect them all, offering abundant opportunities for microbes to reproduce. The chances for the virus to mutate as it skips from bird to bird are multiplied many times over. “Once an influenza virus invades a commercial poultry farm,” scientists warned, “it has an optimum number of susceptible poultry for rapid viral evolution.”

But researchers have also found there’s something even more perilous than a country of dense commercial chicken farms. That’s one like Thailand, a country in transition, where commercial farms operate in the midst of extensive traditional flocks. These small holdings represent a vital link in the chain of infection. For the flu virus to migrate from its natural reservoir in waterfowl, it needs an initial toehold in domestic poultry. Asia’s traditional backyard farms, with their freely grazing birds and even fewer safeguards, offer just this opening. They are like kindling wood around the larger commercial farms. And the larger commercial farms, which have mostly sprung up near their markets, are concentrated around another vulnerable population: the unprecedented accumulation of humanity in the metropolises of East Asia.

As Jan Slingenbergh of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and his fellow researchers write, “Agricultural practices have become the dominant factor determining the conditions in which zoonotic pathogens evolve, spread and eventually enter the human population.” More pointedly, the FAO said in 2008 that the rapid development of Asia’s poultry industry without due regard for animal health created a “virtual time bomb” that “exploded” with the outbreak of H5N1.

Sangwan Klinhom was a Thai country singer in the parts around Suphan Buri. His resonant tenor earned him a following, but little money. The tips couldn’t even pay the rent. “If you’re a singer, you’re very poor,” he explained. “Some die without a coffin.” So he eventually abandoned the circuit of farmyard weddings and cheap beer joints for the roving life of a duck herder.

When I encountered him in the shade of a coconut tree, Sangwan was rolling a homemade cigarette fashioned from a palm frond. He would occasionally glance up to check on his flock, nearly a thousand khaki Campbell ducks pecking and scavenging in the mucky waters of a rice paddy several miles north of Banglane village. Despite the intense midday heat, he wore a heavy brown knit cap with a blue pompom to keep the sun off his head. His brow was deeply furrowed, his jowls weathered. Beneath thick, graying eyebrows, his deep-set eyes were bloodshot from sun and stress. Once again, he was singing a plaintive tune.

The practice of grazing ducks in rice fields, which initially developed in southern China, had long since spread to the wetlands of Southeast Asia. Herders like Sangwan followed the rice harvest, trucking their flocks from province to province in pickups and feeding the ducks for free on residual grains, insects, and snails in the muddy water. “The ducks give you anything you want,” he told me. “If you want something, you wait a bit and you get it. I didn’t even have a house before.” But now this barefoot nomad and countless others like him were being pressed by Thai officials to renounce their wandering ways and shut their flocks up in closed shelters. Ducks had been fingered as silent killers.