Thailand Offers Hope in Bird Flu War
Date: 02-Feb-04
Country: THAILAND
Author: Vissuta Pothong
"I'm confident the cull is nearly finished," Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsuthin told reporters at Bangkok's Chatuchak market, the world's biggest, where infected fighting cockerels were found this week.
"On Sunday, we should have some good news. We'll rub out areas which have been red areas," he added, referring to zones around outbreaks which have led to at least eight human deaths and the slaughter of millions of domestic fowl.
However, he did not get to meet Surat Booncheua, one of the many Asians furious with their governments over a disease, suspected to have been spread by migrating birds, which threatens millions of livelihoods.
"We pay our taxes, so he's our employee," Surat said as he headed for a showdown with the minister.
But the 64-year-old fighting cock breeder, who said the government was offering 20 baht ($0.51) compensation for birds worth up to 10,000 baht, could not fight his way through the mob of reporters to vent his anger at the government.
So Surat said he would kill and eat his cockerels rather than let Somsak's men stuff them in a sack to be tossed into a lime-coated pit and buried alive.
He was one of many distraught Asians who blame their governments for their devastation and some officials say they are right. Thailand admitted it "screwed up" and Indonesian officials confessed to knowing of bird flu back in December.
MYSTERIES
But the fear is far from conquered.
"It is entirely conceivable that there are more cases of avian flu in China, and indeed other countries, than are currently known or reported because the surveillance systems may not be able to pick up every single case," said Beijing-based WHO spokesman Roy Wadia.
For health experts, stamping out the virus before it mutates into a form that could pass from human to human is the urgent priority and the WHO says slaughter is the most efficient way to go about it.
That means Surat's cockerels must die.
So far, all eight people - seven of them children - confirmed to have died from bird flu have caught it directly from infected chickens.
But where and when the H5N1 avian flu virus first appeared is still a mystery, at least to the public.
Geneva-based WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said samples were taken in a country he would not name "several months ago" which proved to be the virulent H5N1 virus that can cross the species barrier, as SARS did last year.
"The samples were taken last year, but the country where it occurred didn't have the capacity to determine whether it was H5N1," he said. "The samples were stored and sent to a WHO collaborating center recently and found to show H5N1."
The WHO said on its Web site at www.who.int test results from countries which have the disease indicated the virus "has been circulating in parts of Asia for longer than presumed."
But, it said, these studies did not point to where it had originated.
"NOT CHINA"
China, accused of deceiving the world about the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which killed 800 people and frightened the world last year, denied vehemently suggestions in the British weekly New Scientist magazine that it was the source.
The accusation "is completely inaccurate, is without proof and moreover does not respect science," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said.
However, one mystery still lingers.
The WHO has asked Beijing for further clarification on a baffling case of bird flu that killed a Hong Kong man and infected his family after a visit to China a year ago.
The man died and his son fell sick with the H5N1 strain in early 2003 in Hong Kong after returning from a visit to China's southern province of Guangdong and the neighboring province of Fujian.
"It is a mystery in the sense that we don't know where this father and son picked up their infection from," WHO spokesman Roy Wadia said.
One unofficial theory was that the father and son were infected at a Hong Kong park