This wasn’t the first probable case of human transmission. But the evidence this time was incontrovertible. Sakuntala’s mother, Pranee, hadn’t even been in the same province when her daughter got sick. There was no way they could have caught the bug from the same chickens. In fact, there was no poultry at all in the Bangkok apartment where Pranee lived, nor in the factory where she worked. She had certainly contracted the virus at her daughter’s bedside, and that was the same way the aunt had likely caught it. “It was a clear indication that H5N1 could be transmitted from person to person,” Dowell said later. “Even though a number of us who had studied H5N1 closely over time thought that had probably already occurred, there was a widespread perception that the virus couldn’t be transmitted person to person.”
Dowell told me he faulted WHO and his own institution, the CDC, for too long leading the public to believe that bird flu could not be passed among people. Even if the transmission was limited, it was of grave concern. This was precisely how the virus could become proficient at spreading, he explained. It was through the process of passing from one human to another that a mutating strain could select the genetic attributes required to become a mass killer.
Once the evidence had been presented, Prasert coaxed his colleagues to accept the inevitable conclusion. He had the rare combination of independence, savvy, and scientific credentials to make it happen.
A day later Thailand’s health ministry announced that the Kamphaeng Phet cluster had been “probable human-to-human transmission” of bird flu.
“For the political leadership in Thailand to say there was person-to-person transmission, that hadn’t happened before,” Dowell recounted. “It’s a testament to Prasert and the influence he was able to wield in Thailand.”
WHO released a statement about the Thai cluster that same day, copying the government’s language and for the first time conceding “a probable case of human-to-human transmission.” The virus had crossed a threshold, and so had its antagonists.
But even as they accepted how close H5N1 had now come to an epidemic strain, they had little inkling of what was about to happen. The death of yet another Vietnamese youngster right after New Year’s Day 2005 would mark a new, even larger wave of infections. The virus would extend its reach in the new year as never before. It would soon strike beyond Asia, infecting new continents, multiplying its victims, and confronting the flu hunters with the prospect of imminent pandemic.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIVE
Livestock Revolution
When Prathum Buaklee dropped out of fourth grade to plant rice like his father and grandfather, he could not envision the revolution that would roll across the wetlands of central Thailand, lifting his family out of destitution and ultimately sending his own sons on to university in Bangkok. The royal capital, though only seventy-five miles southeast of Prathum’s village of Banglane, seemed like another continent in the 1950s. Those sons of Suphan Buri province fortunate enough to escape its hardships first had to find their way to the Tha Cheen River, which slices through the swampy, low-lying plain. Roads were few, little more than muddy tracks rutted by the wheels of cattle carts. So local journeys were often made in wooden rowboats that glided through weedy marshes and along a labyrinth of canals skirting the glistening emerald paddies. Once the travelers reached the river, they would hitch rides on the lumbering, two-story rice barges that hauled the province’s harvest southward. Departing after the worst of the midday heat, they would arrive in Bangkok at dawn the next morning.
Nearly everyone who remained behind grew rice. It was a hard life, long days under the searing, tropical sun, and the rewards were modest. “It wasn’t enough. Just barely enough to make a living,” Prathum recalled, a deep furrow cutting across his broad forehead like freshly tilled earth. He erected a small, traditional house, a leaky hovel of clapboard and corrugated metal on stilts, and bought himself a bullock cart.
At first, change came slowly to Suphan Buri. In the drier, upland area to the north and west of the province, villagers started cutting down the bamboo forest in the mid-1960s and planting sugar cane. Day by day, the jungle shrank until the cane fields eventually nestled against the base of the mountains. Long-distance bus service was introduced, putting Bangkok only four hours away along a rocky, bone-jarring road.
Then, two decades later, chicken made its debut. A pair of Thai poultry companies, including the Charoen Pokphand enterprise that would ultimately become the country’s premier multinational corporation, came to Suphan Buri, urging rice farmers to raise chicken instead. The companies offered them chicks, feed, and guaranteed prices for mature broilers. Some of this activity was driven by Thailand’s campaign to boost poultry exports. But far more profound changes were also at work. The kingdom had embarked on an ambitious course of economic development, tapping its wealth of natural resources, cheap labor, and open investment climate to become a low-cost manufacturing dynamo. As its shirts, shoes, and consumer electronics crowded American and European shelves, Thailand staked a claim as one of the new Asian tiger economies, recording annual growth rates of nearly 10 percent. This translated into rising incomes for many Thais, especially in the cities, and the new, burgeoning middle class had new, urban tastes. They demanded a better diet, in particular one rich in animal protein. Nowhere was this truer than in the boomtown of Bangkok.
Suphan Buri was strategically located to meet this demand. In the late 1970s, the government had built a paved road linking the province to the capital. Now the Bangkok market was barely two hours away. Many peasants took advantage of cheap land prices to expand their holdings and establish chicken farms. By 1987, Thais had doubled the average amount of chicken they ate. Yet production across the country was growing so fast that prices actually declined, making chicken an even cheaper source of protein than fish or pork and fueling demand further. The consumption of chicken would soon double again. But the new middle class yearned for variety, and that also meant soaring demand for eggs.
Even as Prathum continued to toil in the rice fields, fellow villagers in Banglane were starting to experiment with hen farms. In 1991 Prathum followed suit. He began with three hundred laying hens, soon adding several hundred more. When his flock grew into the thousands, he abandoned the paddies altogether.
“I never imagined the changes when I started out,” he told me, chuckling softly, creases deepening at the corners of his eyes. He spoke with the exaggerated inflection of a Suphan Buri native. Even today, this distinct accent marks people from the province as something of country bumpkins, at least in the reckoning of their cosmopolitan Bangkok cousins. But they’re hardly poor yokels. Prathum eventually bought twenty acres of land, more than tripling the size of his holdings, and erected seven open-sided sheds, each stretching about forty yards under pitched metal roofs. His flock reached fifteen thousand birds. And with average Thai consumption of eggs doubling in just a decade, Prathum’s hens were indeed laying gold. “We got a better income so we could do whatever we wanted,” he continued, gently shaking his head with wonder and then bowing it slightly to acknowledge the good fortune. “I feel grateful to the chickens. Chickens are like human beings. You take care of them and they’ll take care of you.”
Three years after he started chicken farming, this broad-shouldered peasant who had once been unable to afford even a motorbike bought a used Ford pickup. A few years later, after the increasingly prosperous village put in paved roads, he added a second, a new one. He knocked down his old shack, replacing it with an airy wood-frame dwelling three times as large. He furnished it with a refrigerator, color television, and air-conditioning. To give his teenage daughter privacy, he later built her a separate room, her territory marked by a Britney Spears poster on the outside of the door. He then went on to construct a second house, a retreat on the edge of some neighboring paddies, and started taking vacations with his family, renting a van twice a year and driving to the mountains of northwestern Thailand. For each of his three children, he bought a new computer. One son went on to study veterinary science at the university in Bangkok; the other, computer engineering.
But then, a dozen years after he answered their calling, chickens changed his life again. On a warm
