Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Edge of the Abyss
Pandemic? Very, very likely. 206
WHO regional director for Asia
The economic impact of the avian flu epidemic on the Southeast Asian countryside was profound. Thou-
sands of small chicken farmers were bankrupted and forced out of business, thus yielding ground, as Chear-
avanont had urged, to the corporate operators. Meanwhile, the unprecedented market turbulence unleashed
by the H5 epidemic in Asia, followed by the H7 outbreaks in North America, encouraged the big poultry
producers to poach one another's customers. In the United States, giants like Tyson and Pilgrim's Pride
were “already reaping some benefits from the bird flu virus” in late January as they rushed exports to re-
place the quarantined Thai supply. Jim Summer, president of the Poultry and Egg Export Council, told re-
porters that the avian flu “is going to have an unbelievable impact on the poultry industry” and boasted of
a surge in hiring by U.S. companies. CP, meanwhile, exploited its own disaster by increasing exports from
plants in Taiwan and other nonembargoed countries to take advantage of the sharp rise in chicken prices.
To offset current and future EU import controls, Chearavanont also announced an ambitious expansion of
poultry operations in Romania, Russia, and Ukraine, and he reassured his shareholders that they would
soon reap profit from the influenza-driven restructuring of global chicken production. 207
All of this cheery news from the giant chicken producers was of little solace to the researchers strug-
gling to understand the spectacular menace of H5N1 GenZ. An extraordinary research consortium com-
bining the resources of Robert Webster's St. Jude Hospital group, the veteran team from the University of
Hong Kong, and local experts from across Asia had been working feverishly to unravel the genealogy and
molecular structure of the 2003-4 strain. To achieve a panoramic view of its evolution, they sequenced and
compared the genomes of hundreds of viral samples obtained from human victims and poultry. Their find-
ings were disturbing.
In a letter to Nature in July 2004, they warned the virus's erstwhile conquerors that, in fact, avian
flu—now comfortably ensconced among asymptomatic domestic ducks—was almost ineradicable. “H5N1
is now endemic in poultry in Asia and has gained an entrenched ecological niche from which to present a
long-term pandemic threat to humans.” Moreover, its sudden retreat in March might have had more to do
with influenza's seasonal cycle than with the mass murder of chickens: “Since 2001, H5N1 viruses have
continued to circulate in mainland China with a seasonal pattern, peaking from October to March, when
the mean temperature is below 20 centigrade.” They also noted that “the timing and distribution of the
H5N1 infection in China from 2001 onwards coincides with the general period of winter bird migration to
southern China: however it is not know whether the H5N1 virus has become established in wild bird pop-
ulations.” 208
Although they now possessed a detailed map of the structure of GenZ—each protein had been analysed
to the last amino acid group—they were still baffled by its functional organization: they had, so to speak, a
 
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