He paused again, briefly, eyes lowered.
When he finished, Sangwan drew a bag of tobacco from the pocket of his baggy shirt and began rolling another cigarette. He fretted that the best days seemed to be over. Thai officials were already threatening to restrict the movement of ducks from one village to another. He could never afford to raise his flock in a closed shelter, he said. The feed bill would bankrupt him and the ducks would rebel.
After the government first floated the idea in late 2004, Sangwan had experimented with confining the ducks to a shed beside his house. It lasted a week. “I felt restless because the ducks couldn’t walk around and they didn’t have enough food,” he recounted. “The ducks were not happy.” That was bad news for business because, he confided to me, ducks are like pregnant women. They need to be pampered or they get nervous and lay their eggs prematurely. “I feel like I have a thousand little wives,” he said, a grin briefly breaking through. “When the ducks get tense, I get tense.”
To protest the proposed farming regime, his wife had led hundreds of peasants to the provincial capital. They besieged a government building for three hours, accusing officials of acting arbitrarily and sowing needless anxiety. “When the government says ducks carry bird flu, it just makes people panic,” Sangwan complained, growing agitated. “It’s not true that ducks get the flu. For twenty years I’ve been raising ducks and I’ve never seen one get bird flu.”
In the months after I met Sangwan, the Thai government would bar farmers from transporting their flocks from one region to another and eventually, in 2006, place a total ban on duck grazing. Thailand’s initiative sputtered, but the country ultimately achieved more than neighbors like Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, where duck herding remains common. When flu outbreaks unexpectedly erupted across more than a dozen provinces of northern Vietnam in 2007 after a long period of quiet, sickening people in the country for the first time in eighteen months, ducks were implicated. A special investigation blamed the epidemic on a dramatic influx of young ducks into the paddies of the Red River delta. By contrast, many of the estimated 10 million free-range ducks in Thailand were ultimately slaughtered or moved indoors.
But even there, compliance was spotty. Some Thai duck herders continued to follow the cycle of the crops as they had for generations, thwarting efforts to snuff out the disease. It had been several harvests since I met Sangwan when I heard about a group of herders who’d illegally moved three flocks with as many as fifteen thousand birds into the fields of Kanchanaburi province, just west of Suphan Buri. The chickens in several local villages began to die within two weeks. When those near the home of a peasant named Bang-on Benphat started to fall sick and collapse, the forty-eight-year-old man butchered them for dinner. His young son helped pluck the feathers. Both soon developed a fever and lung infections. Bang-on was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. Two days later he died, a casualty of flu.
Prathum sat cross-legged on his back porch, surveying all that he and his chickens had built. His eyes panned past across the barn and the sheds, where his amply nourished hens were settling in for the afternoon, past the fish ponds, where a fleeting fin glinted amid the vines of morning glory, toward a line of trees casting long shadows at the edge of his property.
His thoughts returned to those new, modern chicken shelters that farmers were chattering more about. They were called evap houses, short for evaporative cooling houses. They had automatic ventilation and used large fans and water to maintain mild temperatures even during intense tropical heat. Because they were enclosed, they could keep out most contagion. “Even insects can’t get in,” he noted, impressed. But the cost was tremendous. He would need a loan and have to quadruple the size of his flock to make the numbers work. He would need at least five years to break even. No need to be hasty, he reasoned.
“I’m not worried right now,” he put it to me. “We haven’t heard anything lately about the epidemic. Maybe the disease left with our last lot of chickens. The new ones all look healthy.”
His wife appeared in the doorway with a watermelon. She wasn’t buying his cool assurance. “I’m definitely afraid the disease will come back to this area,” she offered. “Some people say the disease came with the wind. Some say it came with birds. We have no clear idea. And deep down, he’s still worried about it, too.” She glared at Prathum, then laughed.
“Yes, I’m still scared,” he confessed. “But I try not to show it. What can I do? We’d never had bird flu before. It just came. I’m hoping it won’t come again.”
Prathum took the watermelon from his wife. He grabbed a knife from the bench and started carving the fruit.
His sons were urging him to invest in an evap house, he told me without looking up. It was all that fancy university education. His older son, the one studying veterinary science, he’d even visited several evap houses to check them out. But Prathum had seen enough change in his life.
“I may not be able to learn as fast as young people,” Prathum said. “I’ll retire after a while and pass the farm on to my son. Then, he can do what he wants.”
CHAPTER SIX
From a Single Spark
Professor Yi Guan gingerly placed the small cooler box with its mysterious contents into his black canvas satchel. He covered the box with a towel, then a newspaper, to conceal it from prying eyes. He wasn’t quite sure what he had. Whatever it was, it had already proven to be a ruthless killer. The cooler box contained about two dozen vials, and lurking inside each one, Guan feared, was enough biohazardous material to start a global epidemic. But the specimens could also be the world’s salvation—if only he could get them back to his laboratory in Hong Kong.
Guan slung the strap of the satchel over the shoulder of his gray suit jacket and headed for the door of the hospital. The medical staff at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases had nervously collected the mucus specimens from the noses and throats of patients stricken by the strange plague now burning through China’s Guangdong province. The institute director, an esteemed scientist named Dr. Nanshan Zhong, had agreed that Guan could take the samples back to Hong Kong University for identification. But Guan had no such permission from the Chinese government. If he was stopped, he had no papers to show. If the vials were discovered, they could be confiscated and Guan detained. He could be held until his Beijing contacts vouched for him, if he was fortunate. If not, he could be accused of stealing state secrets or espionage and sentenced to life in a labor camp.
Chinese officials were determined to keep the severity of the epidemic under wraps. That very morning, February 11, 2003, Guangzhou’s vice mayor had announced that the city was facing an outbreak of unusual pneumonia but it was under control and no extraordinary measures were required. But WHO was already picking up rumors of a far more serious outbreak involving a “strange contagious disease” that “left more than 100 people dead in Guangdong Province in the space of one week.”
