Plague and Profit - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 46

serted that the strain of H5N1 circulating in eighty districts from Sumatra to Kalimantan and West Timor,
which had already killed 15 million chickens, was different from the virus in Vietnam and posed no threat
to humans—a claim dismissed as nonsense by scientists.
Chinese officials managed to be even more arrogant and egregious in their attempt to save face than
their Indonesian counterpart. In the first week of February they grudgingly doled out in bits and pieces the
admission that H5N1 was raging in no fewer than twelve provinces and cities, including Guanxi, Guang-
dong, and even metropolitan Shanghai. Ten days later, Chen Kaizhi, a top official in Guangzhou, demon-
strated the stunning scientific ignorance of senior bureaucrats like himself in a speech to the Guangdong
People's Congress: “This disease is hundreds of years old and it can be prevented and treated. Vaccines
are effective. No humans have been infected, so why this uproar?” Chen went on to contrast the hysteria
of Hong Kong health officials, the WHO and other “outsiders” with traditional folk wisdom. “In the past
when life was hard, we hoped for a disease among our chickens so that we got to eat chicken. When a
chicken at home dropped its head, we said, 'good, now we get to eat chicken.' Now we are so advanced
that people are not allowed to eat diseased chicken.” 196
Chen, of course, ignored the fact that, thanks to the cover-ups in Guangdong and elsewhere, thousands
of people had consumed diseased chicken products. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong media that had earlier
reported suspected cases in the PRC or now dared to criticize the ignorance of officials like Chen were
threatened with legal action under the same infamous mainland statute that had been used to suppress re-
portage of SARS a year earlier.
While observers speculated about what had happened to the short-lived reign of scientific and medical
“transparency” in China, the OIE and WHO were desperately worried about the haphazard, and, in some
cases, perfunctory character of the poultry culls that were Asia's only hope of containing the H5N1 cata-
strophe. In Thailand, where prisoners were mobilized under army supervision to bury millions of chickens
alive, the flocks of small producers, as we have seen, were dutifully massacred, while corporate chick-
ens received special treatment. Activists charged that “workers and consumers' health clearly comes after
exporters wealth,” and the WHO scolded the government for its lackadaisical attitude toward protecting
farmers and cullers from infection. Thai authorities also wasted valuable time in the needless slaughter of
wild birds and urban pigeons after Prime Minister Thaksin, in characteristic xenophobic fashion, blamed
“foreign” wildfowl for starting the epidemic. 197

Table 8.1.
Covering-up the Epidemic

Country Official Admission Actual Onset

S. Korea 12/12/03

Vietnam 1/8/04 10/03

Japan 1/12/04

Thailand 1/23/04 11/03

Cambodia 1/24/04

China 1/27/04 early 03

Laos 1/27/04

Indonesia 2/2/04 8/03