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KILLER CHICKENS: Why scientists worry about Asia's bird...
Health officials have long been worried that the next deadly global epidemic--a slate wiper, as epidemiologists call it--would be a new kind of deadly flu to which humans have no resistance. And since the 1960s, their fears have been focused on the H5N1 virus, a bird pathogen that is generally harmless in its host species (ducks and other wildfowl) but extremely deadly when contracted by chickens. It was H5N1 that struck Hong Kong in 1997, where it went straight from chickens to humans. Authorities quickly killed 1.4 million birds, and although six people died, the disease never managed...
What scares scientists most about H5N1 is that someone eventually will be stricken by the bird flu and a human flu at the same time, allowing the viruses to swap genetic material. The resulting hybrid could be both deadly and virulent. Even if it weren't immediately contagious, it could quickly evolve. A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the SARS virus mutated in a matter of months from a form that could infect only 3% of people who came in contact with it to one that infected 70%. Once it mutated, SARS quickly spread around...
Hong Kong's 1997 experience alerted the world to the dangers of bird flu and offered a lesson on how to control it: kill sick chickens, and do it as fast as possible. That lesson obviously didn't sink in. Vietnam, the third country to acknowledge the presence of bird flu (after South Korea and Japan) in December, had outbreaks as far back as July. Birds started dropping dead in Thailand in early November, but the government insisted until last week that the chickens merely had a bacterial ailment. Heavily populated Indonesia has been hard hit but refused to cull...
Dissembling and stalling by local governments have already allowed the pathogen to spread in Asia--not only in birds but also among the men and women who raise them for a living and the kids who gather eggs or simply kick up infected dust in their villages. "If I had known about the bird flu," says Roongroj Boontang, the uncle who allowed Kaptan Boonmanuj to play with his fighting roosters, "my nephew would still be alive." --Reported by Andrew Perrin/Ben Ya Pad, Karl Taro Greenfeld and Bryan Walsh/Hong Kong and David Bjerklie/New York