Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

Chickens also constitute part of the social contract binding communities together, providing what Wardana’s matronly neighbor Made Narti described as the “solidarity of the centuries.” Though her good fortune has translated into a flock of several hundred chicks, she recalls a time when she was hungry and had to turn to her fellow villagers of Tegal Tegu for chicken. She said she has reciprocated countless times. “For generations, chickens have lived very close in the lives of us Balinese,” she recounted. The elderly raise chickens as a hobby. The devout raise them as a matter of faith. Four times a month, Narti slaughters a bird and carries it with a plate of fruit and flowers down the narrow, walled alley to a Hindu temple. It’s an offering to the gods.

Some public health officials have urged an end to backyard farming. But it is so tightly stitched into the cultural fabric of Asian life that the prescription is sure to fail. “If you seriously proposed eradicating backyard poultry farming, you would get a lot of undesirable outcomes,” said Jeffrey Mariner, a veterinary professor at Tufts University dispatched to work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Indonesia. Senior FAO officials have cautioned that a ban would simply force poultry farming underground. This could also alienate villagers from other programs to control the virus, for instance notifying authorities of outbreaks, Mariner explained.

Mariner is not one to underestimate the threat of flu. In early 2006, he helped set up and train teams of inspectors to uncover outbreaks that had gone undocumented. “We thought at the time we’d find that bird flu is underreported. We never imagined the extent to which this is true,” he said. They started with twelve districts on Java, then twenty-seven districts, then the outer islands. Everywhere the teams looked, they found the virus. Even on training exercises they found it. “It’s very widespread, and it’s difficult to address the disease, since it’s in the backyard system.”

In the two months before my visit to the village of Tegal Tegu, Mariner’s teams had confirmed a dozen different outbreaks in Bali, including a pair just days earlier. Animal-health officials had burned more than a thousand chickens in a bid to contain the epidemic in one location on the resort island. Though Narti had heard about bird flu on television, she remained oblivious. “Bali is safe. There’s no bird flu here,” she assured me. Her warm eyes, full cheeks, and thick lips offered a mother’s comforting smile. “It happened on Java. The chickens that got bird flu on Java had white feathers. My chickens mostly have green feathers.”

Researchers elsewhere in Southeast Asia have found that villagers are widely cognizant of bird flu’s perils yet continue to take risks with their own backyard birds. As they have for generations, they handle sick and dying fowl, butcher and eat birds that have died of illness, and even let their children play with infected livestock. The contradiction is not surprising. For years, long before the disease struck, they have seen their own relatives and neighbors engage in these practices and rarely come to harm. As a precaution, Narti volunteered she was in the habit of separating out any of her birds that seemed sick and fortifying the rest with vitamins, including a supplement to combat depression and stress. “But there’s really nothing to worry about,” she added. “I don’t think it could happen here.”

Asia’s live poultry markets leave many Westerners queasy. Deep inside the cavernous Orussey Market in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, a short walk from the fairy-tale spires of the royal palace, scores of live chickens and ducks are crammed together, legs bound, on wood pallets speckled with droppings. Shoppers stoop over to scrutinize the birds like customers examining cantaloupes in a Safeway, then hang the beleaguered creatures upside down from hooks to measure their weight. Some shoppers carry off their cackling purchases to finish them off at home. Others turn them over to butchers, who hunch on the muddy floor, slitting throats and plucking feathers. So, too, in the dim light of Jakarta’s Jatinegara Market, one of more than thirteen thousand live poultry markets in Indonesia, a dozen boys squat amid stacks of pungent cages on a tile floor slick with death. With swift slices of the knife, these barehanded youths dismember the chickens and then tug out their entrails, heaping them up for waiting customers. Blood trickles down ruts in the floor and spills into the alley outside.

Many Asians swear by freshly killed chicken, duck, and goose, insisting they are tastier and more nutritious. But Robert Webster has vigorously argued that “wet markets” represent a perilous nexus where flu viruses can amplify, swap genetic material, and spread. WHO’s expert committee on avian flu has endorsed this view. Each morning, live markets are restocked with birds, and with them new microbes. They can infect merchants, customers, and other animals, who by day’s end may carry the contagion onward to new frontiers. Researchers in the early 1990s identified live markets as a “missing link” to explain flare-ups of a low-pathogenic strain among poultry in the United States. After the 1997 human outbreak in Hong Kong, investigators ultimately traced six of the deaths back to wet markets. The city instituted new safeguards, including the screening of poultry from mainland China and a ban on the sale of live ducks and geese. But the virus nonetheless returned to Hong Kong’s markets five years later. On the mainland, where an even wider array of flu strains has continued to circulate amid the poultry stalls, Chinese researchers concluded that six city dwellers who came down with bird flu had likely caught it during recent market visits. These patients had no other known exposure to sick poultry.

Yet despite these scientific warnings, Asian governments have been hard-pressed to break people of their longtime passion for freshly butchered meat. Some countries, notably Vietnam, have begun phasing out wet markets and building modern slaughterhouses. But Webster counseled that, as with backyard farming, a complete ban on wet markets would simply drive this commerce underground. Demand would remain strong and prices high while monitoring for disease would become far more difficult.

Among Southeast Asians, it is Vietnamese who take fresh furthest, with a delicacy called tiet canh vit. This popular pudding is traditionally prepared from raw duck blood and served at meals to mark the anniversary of a death in the family, the celebration of Tet, the lunar New Year, and other special occasions. It is typically washed down with rice wine. Tiet canh vit is also sold widely in the market. Health investigators suspect that at least five people from two families in northern Vietnam contracted bird flu after feasting on the dish. After hearing this, I told a Vietnamese friend in Hanoi that I simply had to have the recipe. She e-mailed the following.

1. Cut a small incision in the duck/chicken to get the blood in a bowl. Pour some drops of lime into the blood bowl.

2. In a separate bowl, mix chopped bowel and stomach together.

3. Mix the blood liquid (the first bowl) and the stock (the second bowl) with the ratio of one spoon blood to two spoons stock. You will also put some fish sauce in, as much as desired.

4. Set aside for about half an hour. The mixture will form a texture like pudding cake.

For many in Asia, birds are an essential element of everyday life, synonymous with sustenance, commerce, companionship, and even national identity. Moreover, for some, they are also linked to aspirations not just for this life but for the life to come.

Over the centuries, Buddhists across much of Asia have released the sorrows born of sickness, hunger, and war through the simple, cathartic act of buying caged birds and setting them free. In front of the shimmering gold pagoda of Wat Phnom, erected on the wooded knoll that lent Phnom Penh its name, Cambodian devotees reach inside the metal and wire mesh cages, draw out sparrows, swallows, munias, and weavers, often in pairs, and raise them in cupped palms to their lips. The adherents mumble a prayer and, often with a kiss, set them free into the warm, still air. But this tradition, in which devotees seek blessings for this life and the next, could now prove to be a curse. The lethal flu strain has been isolated from some of the wild species most commonly peddled outside the shrines of Buddhist Asia from Thailand to Taiwan. The hazards posed by the collection and release of these so-called merit birds is akin to that of live poultry markets.