South China Farms Ever Ripe for Pandemic
Date: 20-Jan-04
Country: CHINA
Author: Jonathan Ansfield
He witnessed the wrath of bird flu - potentially more infectious - last October, when a freshly bought yellow duckling dropped dead in his backyard 20 miles outside the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Within a week, the bug had wiped out 300 of his 500 baby ducks.
"I took the body to a veterinarian and he said, 'If they catch a flu, you might as well just let them die off. You can't cure it.' When they die, they die fast."
No need to tell that to breeders devastated by avian flu this winter in South Korea, Japan and most alarmingly Vietnam, where the World Health Organization confirmed on Tuesday the bug had hurdled the species barrier and killed at least three people.
Chen, 45, boasts that he has never fallen sick on the farm. But his lifestyle is the sort that makes epidemiologists cringe.
He lives beside a mucky pond in a tree bark cabin abutting a corrugated steel shelter, where the ducks waddle up the banks to feed and scatter their droppings on the way down.
LETHAL NEW STRAINS
Small farms like his, squalid and teeming with fetid animals, are widely believed to make southern China and other densely populated areas across Asia cauldrons for lethal new flu strains.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the flu-like illness that first swept out of Guangdong last year to claim 800 lives around the globe, was only the latest warning sign.
In response to new suspected cases, Guangdong has declared war on the civet cat and similar species, based on lab evidence that they harbour a coronavirus similar to the SARS pathogen. Rats, meanwhile, are the target of a spring cleanup drive.
But the rural breeding grounds for mutant flu offshoots have not changed.
Scientists, though often stymied in their attempts to connect the dots, commonly point to a triangle of contagion linking man, bird and swine.
As the theory goes, viruses of farmers and fowl may co-mingle or trade genes. An avian flu by-product can then incubate in pigs, which in turn re-infect humans.
Farmers and traders go on to mix with city folk who hop the globe by jet, while trucks haul their teeming flocks to faraway locales. Thus the scale of disease mushrooms.
"A pandemic influenza is certainly much bigger than SARS," said microbiologist Malik Peiris, a SARS expert at the University of Hong Kong.
NEXT BIG PANDEMIC
The prospect of the next big pandemic haunts Southeast Asia. "Asian Flu" in 1957-58 and "Hong Kong Flu" in 1967-68 killed 4.5 million people combined.
Scientists in recent years have even traced the 1918-19 "Spanish flu" pandemic, in which 40 million to 50 million people perished, back to southern China.
Doctors emphasize that Guangdong, home to 90 million people, is but one of many places where new viral diseases may emerge. The deadly West Nile and Ebola viruses broke out in Africa.
"But what is unique in the southern China region or that part of Asia is the live animal market scenario," said Peiris.
"They can exchange viruses, they can amplify within those markets and you have humans coming into repeated contact with animals, a wide diversity of people."
The most vulnerable may not be farmers or traders. SARS studies, for example, have revealed a relatively high infection rate among food industry workers, who tend not to be as exposed.
This month's civet cull marked what many observers consider the first serious crackdown on unhygienic markets in Guangzhou. Many experts said it was long overdue.
Now one big question is how far the government can go in tidying up the animal husbandry business without stripping people of their livelihoods. Another is whether the clean-up can even work, as long as people and animals live in close quarters.
MORE INSPECTORS THAN CUSTOMERS
At Guangzhou's high-profile Xinyuan bird and livestock market recently, there were more government inspectors than customers. The hawkers, huddled next to cages of rabbits and dogs crammed ear-to-jaw, roundly denied any o