announced he’d learned from health officials about a second boy, this one from Suphan Buri province, who had also tested positive for bird flu. He accused the government of hushing up the outbreak for the sake of poultry exports. “I think it’s very late but very late is better than not telling the truth,” Nirun told me at the time.
The next morning, Thailand’s Public Health Minister, Sudarat Keyuraphun, hastily summoned the Bangkok press corps. “There are two cases of bird flu, in a seven-year-old boy from Suphan Buri and a six-year-old boy from Kanchanaburi,” she announced, adding that they were in stable condition. She said that everyone who had contact with the boys would be quarantined for ten days. She blamed the delay in disclosing the cases on the time required to finish testing samples.
The agriculture ministry followed right behind by issuing a statement confirming that chickens on a farm in Suphan Buri province had tested positive for the H5N1 strain. Samples from elsewhere in the country were still being analyzed. Newin, the deputy agriculture minister, announced that a mass slaughter of birds in central Thailand was already under way and that Thailand’s poultry exports were to be suspended.
“It’s not a big deal,” Thaksin reassured the Thai public. “If it’s bird flu, it’s bird flu. We can handle it.”
Tamiflu was urgently flown into the country and immediately administered to the sick boys.
Three days later, Thailand confirmed its first fatality from bird flu. In the early hours of Sunday, January 26, after taking an abrupt turn for the worse, Captan died.
Krisana Hoonsin could not sleep the night he paid eight laborers to slaughter all his chickens. He took a pill to help. When he awoke, he discovered that the silence blanketing the flat, lush province of Suphan Buri had enveloped his farm. Morning broke without the cackling and cooing he had known since he was a teenager. “It reminds me I’m not a chicken farmer anymore,” he told me plaintively. “In a week, all the chickens in our district will be gone.”
One day after Thai officials publicly confessed that bird flu had struck, Krisana sat heartbroken in a small, clapboard kiosk erected inches above a fishpond in front of his farmhouse. He wore a loose, black-checked work shirt and had a slight scar on his left cheek. His eyes were bloodshot, his dark brow deeply furrowed, like some of the nearby plots. Between the fingers of his rough right hand, the thirty-eight-year-old farmer clutched a lit cigarette, but he barely puffed. It would burn to a stub. Then, noticing just in time, he would rub it out and light another. This was still January, one of the coolest months in Thailand, but the midday sun was intense, so Krisana had taken refuge beneath the pitched, corrugated metal roof of the simple shelter. It was here that he had often come at dusk, when his chores were finished, and fondly gaze at one of his poultry sheds on the other side of the narrow country road. “My chickens would recognize me,” he recounted. “They would stick their heads up and see me. Now it’s empty.” His voice cracked. “I still think of all my chickens.”
His birds started getting sick two weeks earlier. He reported it to local livestock officers. Though they assured him it was only a minor case of fowl cholera, he was ordered to take draconian measures and put all seven thousand to death. Too upset to execute the sentence himself, Krisana hired a few locals. They marched down the tight aisles of the poultry sheds, wrestled the birds from the raised metal cages, and stuffed them alive into plastic feed and fertilizer sacks. The chickens were left to suffocate, then buried in a pit coated with lime at the edge of his property. “How can I express the feeling to see all our chickens die that way?” he asked. He let his sandals slip from his feet and rubbed his soles against the rough wood planks. “When you do chicken farming, it’s like you’re taking care of your own children. You love them. They love you back.”
I had come to Suphan Buri early that morning with an energetic Thai journalist, Somporn Panyastianpong, who often worked as my translator. Before we left Bangkok, she had stopped to buy us surgical masks and rubber gloves, though the two health officials I had consulted were unsure whether these would adequately protect us. The disease was still so new, its precise lines of attack still uncharted. We drove north along the modern divided highway that connects the sprawling suburbs of the capital with Thailand’s central wetlands. After an hour, shimmering green rice paddies opened up before us, many fringed with coconut palms. Storks, herons, egrets, and cormorants swooped and scavenged amid the neon fields. Peasants in straw hats meandered along the earthen dikes, hoes slung over their shoulders. A few ragged duck herders, barely teenagers, squatted at the edge of flooded paddies while their flocks waded into the murky waters, shaking their dark brown tail feathers and rooting around in the muck, hunting snails.
As we turned off the main road, we began see the scores of metal-roofed chicken sheds that Suphan Buri’s farmers had raised in making their region one of Thailand’s most prodigious poultry producers. These were long, open-sided structures on wooden stilts that all seemed to jut out over ponds and reservoirs. Under an ingenious system, chicken droppings are not cleared away but allowed to fall between the wooden floorboards into the water, which are stocked with carp, tilapia, and barb. The droppings serve as nourishment and save on fish food. The fish themselves often command better prices at market than the birds. But when the chickens die, the fish go hungry.
Now, as we ventured deeper down the rural roads, we drove past one eerily vacant shed after another. A legion of cullers had swept across the countryside ahead of us, killing an estimated 7 million birds over previous days in Suphan Buri and two other provinces. More than five hundred workers from the agriculture ministry were again fanning out across Suphan Buri to continue the mass slaughter. Teams clad in masks, rubber gloves, and high boots were storming through the sheds, cramming squawking birds into sacks and spraying disinfectant from tanks. Hundreds of Thai soldiers and several dozen prisoners were also being pressed into service, many with brightly colored shower caps to protect their heads. Though the government was targeting four hundred more farms on this day, Newin had warned that teams were running short of sacks and burial space. He told reporters that the cullers were now being forced to use the grounds of Buddhist temples.
Krisana’s family had been raising hens in Suphan Buri for twenty-two years in a village called Baanmai. At first, their aim was to produce just enough eggs for income between rice harvests. But when Krisana took over the farm from his father in 1994, the ambitious young man decided paddy was the past and poultry the future. He immediately quadrupled the number of hens to four thousand, adding more in the following years. It proved a lucrative business. He built an airy, two-story house with a solid brick facade. An upstairs veranda with a cheerful blue-and-purple balustrade looked out over the emerald fields. He bought a new Toyota pickup, parked it out front, and hired a farmhand. He never imagined that one day his livelihood would be buried along with his birds in a hole in the side yard.
Over the years, he had grown accustomed to a few chickens dying suddenly and mysteriously. But he had never witnessed the kind of epidemic that had been stalking his province for the last two months. “It got bigger and bigger and spread from one farm to another before it reached our farm,” he recalled. “Every night, three or four chickens would die.” He consulted a veterinarian, who prescribed antibiotics. They had no effect. Local livestock officers could offer no explanation. The provincial livestock chief reprised the official line that the affliction was fowl cholera. But Krisana was starting to suspect something else. When Vietnam confirmed its poultry had been infected by influenza, Thai television carried reports with footage showing the symptoms. The birds suffered from stiff muscles, reddening skin, and chills, then died. “I saw it on the news and saw the same symptoms here, and I was sure it was bird flu,” he said.
Krisana and his neighbors had alerted officials to their suspicions but were ignored. Now the farmers were livid. They were convinced their flocks could have been salvaged by a swifter government effort to quarantine contaminated farms. “They kept denying and denying and denying it was bird flu. If the government had admitted it earlier, they could have contained it,” he said. A thin smile passed across his sullen face. “Instead, farmers kept transporting chickens and eggs from one place to another.”
Slipping on his sandals, Krisana roused himself from his bench inside the kiosk. He led the way around the side of the house to give me a closer look at one of his chicken sheds, empty and deadly quiet. He shuffled along the wooden planks that served as a short causeway. Though the shed had been disinfected, I was still wary of following. I had the surgical mask and rubber gloves with me but Krisana had neither. I didn’t want to be rude. So with some trepidation, I left them in my bag and poked my head ever so briefly inside the entrance. I tried not to breathe.
When we returned to the kiosk, Krisana’s father came out of the house to join us. At seventy-six, Sompao Hoonsin was still vigorous, with thinning gray hair, and age spots on his broad face. He wore a jolly T-shirt with pictures of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, but his manner was decidedly downcast. In his hand, he carried a small, handwritten note listing the family’s liabilities in blue ink. They totaled nearly $40,000. The family, he explained, netted about $2,500 a month from selling eggs to small-time retailers in Bangkok, and this had long been enough
