Word: sakuntala
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Somsak Laemphakwan's chickens started dying in early August, he buried the corpses deep in the ground, hoping to halt the bird flu ravaging his village in northwest Thailand. It didn't work. Later that month, his 11-year-old niece Sakuntala Premphasri developed a stomachache and a high fever. When Somsak took her to a nearby clinic on Sept. 2, nurses dismissed her illness as a common cold. Five days later Sakuntala was back in the clinic, unable to walk and vomiting blood. She was sent to the district hospital, and her mother, Pranee Thongchan, was summoned from...
...Shinawatra has pledged to wipe out bird flu in the country by the end of October, and last week enlisted more than 900,000 volunteers to cull sick chickens and do spot checks on potential new outbreaks. His biggest challenge is to get poultry-dependent villages like Srisomboon, where Sakuntala Premphasri lived, onto the program. Villagers told a TIME reporter that even though they knew their chickens were likely dying of bird flu in August, they did not alert livestock officials because they believed the government would cull their poultry?including fighting cocks worth as much as $480 each...