Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

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. What 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.”

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.”