ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MARCH 2004

Asian H5N1 pandemic rages on--worst ever factory farm disaster

BANGKOK, BEIJING, JAKARTA--United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization chief Jacques Diouf on February 25 opened an emergency meeting in Bangkok of experts from 23 nations with a warning that the H5N1 avian flu pandemic sweeping Southeast Asia in recent months is not yet under control. Diouf urgently appealed for economic help from other parts of the world.

Photo by Kim Bartlett

Fear that H5N1 could quickly mutate into a virulent human form was heightened on February 19 when Thai scientists confirmed that the disease had killed 14 of 15 housecats kept by one family who had seen one of the cats scavenging a dead chicken. All of the cats fell ill, but one recovered. Further investigation determined, however, that H5N1 had apparently not mutated before killing the cats. In the avian form, H5N1 kills about 70% of the humans it attacks, but it apparently does not cross easily into humans, and attacks mainly children, who have had less time to develop a spectrum of immunities to flu viruses.

Trying to eradicate the H5N1 outbreak before it mutates has involved killing virtually all the poultry of entire regions. The economic fallout may have influenced both Japan and Indo-nesia to claim prematurely that their H5N1 outbreaks were over, and appears to have caused China to hope repeatedly that the disease was geographically contained, only to see it leap hundreds of miles and re-emerge.

Japan came closest to actually stopping H5N1, going from January 12 to February 17 with no new cases before an outbreak erupted among bantam gamecocks kept at a lumber yard far from two earlier Japanese outbreaks.

Thai poultry consumption fell 50%. “Demand for chicken meat has dropped 40% in Jakarta,” poultry producer Eko Sandjojo told Sari P. Setiogi and Multa Fidrus of the Jakarta Post. Poultry consumption in Hong Kong fell from 150,000 birds per day to fewer than 35,000-- less because consumers were scared, however, than because poultry imports were suspended and 35,000 birds per day is all that local farmers produce. Vietnam suspended all poultry sales and transport.

“ In the past when life was hard,” Guangzhou People’s Political Consultative Conference chair Chen Kaizhi lamented to South China Morning Post reporter Leu Siew Ying, “we hoped for a disease among our chickens so that we got to eat chicken. When a chicken dropped its head, we said, `Good, now we get to eat the chicken.’ Now people are not allowed to eat diseased chicken.”
Chinese Deputy Minister of Health Qiang Gao, a vegetarian for 30 years, and perhaps the most prominent vegetarian in China, joined other national leaders in eating chicken on television to help reassure the panic-stricken public. Partly, the televised meals were meant to maintain the public appetite for chicken, as U.S. news media reported. But they were also intended to help subdue vigilante action against healthy chickens and other birds, both domestic and wild.

Mobs led by poorly educated local officials were reportedly responsible for some poultry slaughters that were much more likely to spread H5N1 than prevent it. The killing at times resembled the bird purges waged from 1957 to 1962, when former dictator Mao tse Tung blamed sparrows for famines that killed more than 40 million Chinese people.

An erroneous report from Vietnam that H5N1 had spread to pigs spread the mayhem. Quoting “Ling Long, an official from the animal husbandry office in the Guangxi border city of Dongxing,” Agence France-Presse reported that on January 17 local authorities burned alive 800 pigs smuggled in from Vietnam.

The Guangzhou Daily played up reports about chicken culls, Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen observed on February 2. Yet “At Guangzhou’s Chatou Wildlife & Fowl Wholesale Market,” Bodeen wrote, “live ducks, geese, pigeons, and doves were still being sold, squeezed into cages beside rabbits, cats, and dogs--all considered delicacies in southern China. Vehicles entered and left without being cleaned or sprayed with disinfectant.”

The only facility in China capable of isolating the H5N1 virus to confirm infections was reportedly the National Bird Flu Refer-ence Laboratory in Harbin, near the Russian border--almost as far from Guangdong as one could fly without leaving China.

Panic in India

Panic poultry killing erupted in India during the first week of February without any clear evidence of an avian flu outbreak. To that point, India was the only nation bordering on China to the north that had not been hit. Chickens are the animals most often eaten in India, as elsewhere, but about half of all Indians are vegetarian, and India has few large poultry complexes. In addition, India has conspicuously less cockfighting than other southern Asian nations.

The first Indian reports of chicken deaths due to an unknown flu-like illness came from 20 villages in the Dhubri distrct of Assam, bordering on Bangladesh, said BBC Calcutta correspondent Subir Bhaumik. According to Bhaumik, Dhubri district commissioner Preshanta Barua estimated that 10,000 chickens had died in 10 days.

Three days later, however, Barua told Sushanta Talukdar of The Hindu that only 1,000 chickens died, and just 11 of the 800 chickens kept at six farms in Dhubri proper.

"We might implement the state Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals Act against any poultry farmer who would kill large number of birds, which could send a wrong message,” West Bengal state director of animal resources Swapan Dasgupta told Nirmalaya Bannerjee of The Times of India. This was just before word spread that workers had apparently buried alive about 12,000 chickens at Alphonsus’ Social & Agricultural Centre in Kurseong, West Bengal. Opened in 1964, the site was among India’s first factory farms. Investigators found no hint of avian flu among the carcasses.

The culling procedures in most afflicted nations were comparably crude. Live burial using heavy equipment was the most common killing method. Live burning, most openly practiced in southern China and Bali, Indonesia, was next most often reported. Some Vietnamese farmers locked their chickens in sheds to starve. Only Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore were able to gas all suspect birds. All three nations are surrounded by water and were therefore somewhat more isolated from H5N1 than mainland neighbors.

Vietnam and Thailand each killed about 36 million chickens, Indonesia killed 10 million, and China killed five million.

The poorest Southeast Asian nations killed far fewer, not necessarily because they had less disease. Keepers whose flocks represented most of their resources often tried to hide birds. Even where compensation for culled birds was paid, it was usually just a fraction of value, and allegations flew about officials demanding kickbacks.

Laos had killed 40,000 chickens through February 12 at farms surrounding Vientiane, the capital city. Cambodia killed 25,000 chickens, ducks, and swans. Farmers living along the main roads from Vietnam tried to ward off H5N1 with scarecrows. “The scarecrows are not intended to deter birds,” explained culture ministry spokesperson Hang Soth. “They are part of a long tradition of scarecrows intended to ward off disease or thieves.” Myanmar denied having any H5N1. Outside observers were skeptical.

Conflicting values

“Mass culling always raises a conflict between speedy dispatch and humane slaughter,” observed Compassion In World Farming chief executive Joyce D’Silva. “The appallingly rough treatment of these chickens is a welfare scandal,” D’Silva said.

Changkil Park, founder of the South Korean organization Voice-4-Animals, objected soon after the culling started that the Korean agriculture ministry “failed to provide an adequate system and guidelines to deal with the situation. Local officials were not given any equipment to kill humanely.” Added Voice-4-Animals member Eileen Cahill in a commentary for the Korea Herald, “Voice-4-Animals has evidence that almost all the birds exterminated during the December cull in North Chungcheong were buried alive…It is too late to save them. The only thing we can do now is insist that the minister of agriculture acknowledge the cruelty and ensure that minimum standards of decency are observed. PETA recommends gas slaughter, while the Royal SPCA believes a veterinarian or other experienced person should train workers to break their necks for a quick death.”

“Burying chickens alive is not the right way to do it,” agreed Thai Animal Guard-ians Association chair Roger Lohanon. Lohanon also favored skilled neck-breaking, he told Prabit Rojanaphruk of The Nation, since Thailand lacks gassing equipment. The Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation appealed to governments throughout Asia “to close all live animal markets, to end the trade and consumption of wild animals and dogs and cats, and to urgently address the appalling conditions which millions of livestock are forced to endure.”

The Animals Asia Foundation quoted World Health Organization spokesperson Peter Cordingly as saying, “It might be time, although this is none of WHO’s business, that humans have to think about how they treat animals and how they farm them, how they market them--basically the whole relationship between the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.”

Hong Kong Poultry Wholesalers & Retailers Association chair Steven Wong Wai-chuen on February 9 accused Hong Kong secretary for health, welfare, and food Yeoh Eng-kiong of restricting poultry imports and “using public opinion to push ahead with a centralized slaughtering plan” which would put live marketers out of business. The Thai government on February 10 hosted a Buddhist ceremony to bless the spirits of the dead chickens.

“ More than 100 Buddhist monks chanted blessings for the birds in a merit-making ceremony at the Agriculture Ministry in Bangkok,” the Straits Times of Singapore reported, “before senior officials offered them a meal of fried chicken and chicken curry. The rite is usually performed for dead people. The ceremony followed a government-backed chicken feast at a Bangkok park” three days earlier, “to encourage the public to eat chicken and help the country’s ailing poultry industry.”

Continued the Straits Times, “The mass slaughter violates Buddhist principles. The ceremony was aimed at easing public guilt over killing the birds, government spokesman Prompol Sod-Eiam said.
“ We feel guilty because we are Buddhist,” Prompol told the Straits Time. “The ceremony can make us feel relaxed. We apologize to the souls of the dead chickens.”

Thai public health minister Sudarat Keyuraphan pledged to send psychiatrists and psychologists, along with health workers, to counsel villagers who handled or helped to kill potentially sick chickens. --M.C.