Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

The first outbreak killed twenty thousand of Japfa’s chickens. The company suspected from the symptoms that it was bird flu and sent samples to the agriculture ministry’s veterinary department for testing. Government officials hushed up their findings, informing the company that the deaths were due to an “unknown agent.” But Van Dang Ky, an epidemiologist in the veterinary department, later admitted that “the first signs of an epidemic” were found in Vinh Phuc in July 2003. The timing was inconvenient. “Vietnam was preparing activity for the Twenty-second Southeast Asian Games, and we did not announce it for political and economic reasons,” Ky said.

The Southeast Asian Games came and went that fall, with the prime minister opening the sporting competition at Hanoi’s new national stadium and Vietnam racking up the mother lode of gold medals, and still there was no announcement of the outbreak. Vietnam wanted no rerun of the SARS drama earlier that year, which had tripped up the country’s humming economy. Senior Vietnamese officials hoped to quietly contain this latest epidemic before it delivered a new blow to tourism and trade. But the virus refused to cooperate. It quickly spread to other commercial farms in Vinh Phuc and then to neighboring Ha Tay province, the heart of Vietnam’s poultry industry.

Early on, disease also struck the Vietnamese flocks of the Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand. The first outbreak eventually confirmed by the government was a massive die-off of chickens at one of the company’s industrial farms in Ha Tay. CP, as it’s commonly known, is Thailand’s largest business enterprise. Started by a family of poor Chinese immigrants, it grew from a small Bangkok seed company into a sprawling multinational, with operations in twenty countries ranging from agribusiness and retailing to telecommunications. The family’s connections to Thailand’s senior ministers are legend, prompting allegations from critics in Thailand that CP used these to cover up flu outbreaks on its farms. (By November 2003, the virus had begun devastating flocks in Thailand itself, though the government in Bangkok concealed this until late January 2004.) The company’s chief executive denied that CP had helped spread the disease across Southeast Asia or cover it up.

During one of several trips to Ha Tay, I heard an alternate explanation. Nguyen Xuan Vui, the deputy director of a local animal-health office, described how tens of thousands of chickens were hauled every day from China into the markets of northern Vietnam by small-time traders. Family farmers also drove up to China and brought back nutrients to fatten up their flocks. These imports could easily have been contaminated. Vui’s account appeared to dovetail with the findings of microbiologists, who analyzed the genetic fingerprints of the virus circulating in northern Vietnam and concluded that it had been introduced from China on at least three separate occasions between 2001 and 2005. A single, even massive introduction by a multinational company would have left a different signature. But although the culprits were minor-league merchants, the impact was tremendous. Vui told me that 2 million chickens had been culled in his province at more than 175 different locations over the course of 2003 before the central government ever got around to acknowledging the first outbreak in January 2004.

For a brief period when the initial human cases were confirmed in early 2004, Vietnam opened its doors to dozens of WHO disease specialists. But after the first wave of human cases ebbed, Vietnam closed back up. This was a country that for years had depended mostly on its own wits and was finally discovering a modicum of prosperity after more than a generation of war and deprivation. Senior officials were deeply suspicious of foreign meddling. Dr. Hans Troedsson, WHO’s chief representative in Vietnam, publicly complained in the summer of 2004 that the government had not responded to a new offer of outside expertise nor provided virus samples for analysis. In private, he fretted that his telephone calls and urgent faxes to the health ministry were going unanswered.

WHO officials in Asia and Geneva acknowledged they were completely in the dark about the details of Vietnamese cases, how they arose, and even how many there were. “So basically, bugger all, we still don’t know what the numbers are,” wrote one agency official. The frustration would continue to mount through early 2005 as the rate of human infection in Vietnam accelerated and a pandemic seemed to grow closer. WHO’s office in Hanoi repeatedly tried to raise its “grave concerns” with the government but was again met with silence.

In Geneva, senior officials debated whether to admit in public that they were flying blind. They had neither accurate information from Vietnam nor the freedom to conduct their own field investigations. But WHO did not want to jeopardize its relationship with Vietnam’s health ministry, since they collaborated on a raft of public health issues. “We cannot openly blame Vietnam (at least not yet) but cannot also let people believe that we have access to all the data we need,” one senior WHO official said at the time. “At some point in time we may have to make a radical choice.” A second senior agency official warned that nothing less than the world’s ability to contain a global epidemic was at stake. “I am concerned,” he stressed, “that we are pretending to our Member States and also internally in WHO that we can assess the situation, are capable of detecting the emergence of a pandemic virus and initiating early interventions.” Without transparency, there could be no hope of containment.

Duc Trung and Hoai Nam aspired to be Vietnam’s Woodward and Bernstein. Duc Trung, at age thirty-four, was the senior member of the team. He was a university journalism graduate who had been working at the Thanh Nien newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City for five years when I met him. He had been attracted by the paper’s reputation for investigative reporting. Lanky, with large, soft eyes and smooth skin, his tastes ran to pastel designer shirts, teal on the day we were introduced. He sported a gold watch, and his shoes were impeccably polished. He was well spoken and did most of the talking for the pair, choosing his words carefully.

Though a year his junior, Hoai Nam looked far older. He never reached university, instead spending five years in the Vietnamese army, retiring as a sergeant major. He was short and skinny with an uneven haircut, white sleeves rolled up to his elbows, shoes old and scuffed. He was quick to smile, a broad disarming smile, and when he did, the crow’s-feet would deepen around his eyes and the creases multiply on his cheeks.

“This guy looks like a chicken trader,” Duc Trung told me, patting his partner on the back. “I don’t look the part but he does. That’s why he was chosen for the project.”

A few months earlier, in the summer of 2005, the pair had swapped their office clothes for the soiled shirts and shorts of poultry traders and loitered around the livestock markets until their disguises soaked up the odor. Duc Trung poked a hole in his shirt, near the waist, affixing a tiny video camera barely an inch wide to the inside. Hoai Nam did the same. Posing as novice chicken sellers, the two men repeatedly filmed the illicit, predawn commerce at a Ho Chi Minh City slaughterhouse where merchants bought and sold forged health documents certifying that their birds were free of avian flu. Through these nearly invisible punctures, the reporters offered Vietnamese an education in the corruption and governmental misconduct that would continue to bedevil the country’s battle with the disease.

By the fall of 2005, it looked as though Vietnam had turned a corner. After a long internal debate and repeated delays, the agriculture ministry launched a campaign to vaccinate about 250 million chickens and ducks in all sixty-four provinces. New restrictions were imposed on the breeding, movement, and sale of poultry. To win more cooperation from farmers, the government promised to pay them greater compensation when their birds were culled. As the months passed, poultry outbreaks and human cases declined. Vietnam was widely praised by UN agencies. The U.S. Agency for International Development called its performance “remarkable.”