Edge of the Abyss - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 51

Bad news grew worse in September with human deaths reported in Thailand, the first being a
eighteen-year-old game-bird trainer. As they investigated, WHO officials were horrified to find out that it
was common practice for the owners of fighting cocks to suck blood and mucous from the beaks of birds
injured in a fight. Over the next two weeks an eleven-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old boy died, while
nine other children languished in intensive care. Dr. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's Regional Director for the
Western Pacific Region, warned emphatically in mid-September that “unless intensified efforts are made
to halt the spread of the virus, a pandemic is very likely to occur.” 217 In an oafish attempt to reassure
international opinion that his government was on the job, the Director of the Department of Livestock
Development, Yukol Limlamthong, emphasized that avian flu outbreaks had been identified in “only 56
locations across 23 provinces . . . not hundreds of spots as in some news reports.” The exasperated head
of the Public Health Ministry, Dr. Charal Trinwuthipong, promptly blasted Limlamthong's department for
its negligence in monitoring and reporting outbreaks: “They've not improved! How damned lousy they
were last time, that's how they still are.” 218
While the fur was flying between Thai ministries, simultaneous outbreaks of H5N1 and H3N2 in sev-
eral districts in Thailand again raised the specter of pandemic reassortment. Despite pleas from leading
public-health experts, Prime Minister Thaksin refused to import vaccine from Europe to protect the coun-
try's exposed populations. He did, however, robustly defend CP against embarrassing charges by Cam-
bodian farmers that chickens purchased from CP Cambodia Ltd. were the source of a new outbreak in that
country. 219 He also proposed to aid the big exporters by bartering their contaminated chicken to Moscow.
“When we can't sell in our traditional markets, we need to penetrate new markets by bartering. We can't
leave all this chicken in Thailand.” He ordered his ambassador in Moscow to offer a mountain of chicken
in exchange for Sukol SU-30 fighters for the Thai air force. Vladimir Putin, unsurprisingly, declined to
accept the bargain. 220
All this, however, was just a bizarre prelude to the devastating news revealed to the world by the
WHO on 28 September: Pranee Thongchan in Kamphaeng Phet was the first victim of a probable human-
to-human transmission of the virus, which she contracted from her mortally ill daughter (see Preface ) .
Although Klaus Stohr, the former East German veterinarian who was now head of the WHO Global In-
fluenza Program, reassured the public that the case was epidemiologically a “nonsustained, inefficient,
dead-end street,” CDC scientists were, in fact, frantically sequencing viral samples from the dead mother
and daughter to see if GenZ had “mutated significantly—or worse, reassorted with a human flu”—a pos-
sible consequence of the government's failure to vaccinate hot-spot populations. In a joint statement, the
WHO and FAO warned that avian influenza was now “a crisis of global importance.” 221
Although no human flu genes were found in the viral samples, Pranee's death was an earthquake that
thoroughly shook international confidence in Thailand. More than chicken exports were now endangered:
tourism, the source of 6 percent of the nation's GDP, was under threat. Prime Minister Thaksin respon-
ded with a tantrum in which he blamed the “ignorance” of villagers for the persistence of the outbreak
and—music to the ears of corporate poultry producers—threatened to ban farm families from raising fowl
in their yards. He melodramatically ordered his ministers to eradicate the flu in a month or lose their
heads. And facing charges that livestock authorities were bungling the monitoring of poultry, he called
for a million volunteers to search the country for sick chickens. “I want to X-ray every single inch of the
country,” he told provincial governors. “If we see dead birds during the inspection, we will assume that
it's bird flu and start culling in the region. The government will spend any amount of money on the pro-
ject.” 222
Thaksin's crusade against small farmers and wild birds, however, did not prevent further deaths.
Neighbors of nine-year-old Kanda Siluangon, who died in early October, “blamed district and provincial
livestock officials, saying they did nothing for one month after being notified of the chicken deaths.” 223 A