comment on the contradiction of trapping birds only to set them free, an irony compounded by the success of some boys in catching fowl moments after their release so they can be sold yet again. Not long before my audience with the monk, an environmental group based in the United States had tried to curtail the practice on the grounds that the sale of merit birds represented illegal trade in wildlife. The organization, WildAid, had established a rapid- response unit that included Cambodian military police and forestry officials and carried out several raids on bird peddlers. The campaign culminated in the confiscation of birds sold at Wat Phnom and elsewhere. But this provoked a religious and political backlash. The government suspended further raids.
Even in Hong Kong, which so successfully overcame public opposition in its decisive response to the initial bird flu outbreaks, officials have been reluctant to tackle this revered ritual. Nearly ten years after the virus first jumped to humans, fears of a new outbreak in Hong Kong surged when several dead birds recovered from city streets tested positive for the lethal strain. Among these were munias, which are not native to urban Hong Kong but imported by the tens of thousands from mainland China each year for Buddhist rites. The discoveries prompted Richard Corlett, an ecology professor at the University of Hong Kong, to publicly warn that bird releases posed the principal threat of reinfection in the city. Agriculture officials urged people to refrain from freeing captive birds and asked religious organizations to make a similar appeal to their members. But while the government ultimately suspended trading at Hong Kong’s famous Bird Garden market after an infected starling was discovered there, a similar ban was not imposed on merit-bird releases. The cultural sensitivities were too great.
By the banks of Phnom Penh’s Tonle Sap River stands an ornate, carnival-colored shrine called Preah Ang Dang Ker. Under its steeply pitched roof rests a likeness of the Buddha gazing across the broad gray waters. Around the outside linger peddlers surrounded by cooing and chirping. “I have no concern about getting sick with bird flu, and the buyers have no concern,” offered Srey Leap, a stocky woman in a sweat-stained shirt keeping vigil from the shade of an umbrella. “They never worry about this. It is our Cambodian tradition.” When a family approached, Srey Leap and the other hawkers converged. The five visitors paused to haggle, then purchased an entire cage frenetic with the flapping of about a hundred pairs of wings. They carried it to a low stone wall above the water’s edge. They pulled the birds two by two from behind the mesh and, with the occasional whisper of a prayer, set them loose, casting a line of silhouettes down the ancient river until the entire contents of the cage and whatever contagions it concealed had disappeared along the banks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sitting on Fire
To thwart a gathering pandemic, the perimeter must hold. Once it is breached, there’s no turning back. This precarious frontier, the first and last line of defense separating the pathogen’s animal hosts from the human race, runs through thousands of remote Asian villages. These outposts are vulnerable and often unsuspecting, like the Javanese hamlets that scale the lush, terraced slopes of the Mount Lawi volcano. There, an Indonesian animal-health officer who goes only by the name Suparno had been drafted into keeping the virus in check before it crossed to people. But the day I met Suparno, he preferred to go to lunch.
It was late one morning in May 2005 when this lanky, good- humored veterinarian arrived at an elderly woman’s farmhouse partway up the slopes. Clad in the tan uniform of a civil servant, Suparno announced he’d come to inoculate her chickens against bird flu. While a human vaccine had so far proven elusive, workable poultry vaccines were already in production, and several Asian countries, including Indonesia, had made them the centerpiece of their efforts to contain the virus. Suparno knew the woman kept some chickens. Nearly every family in her village did.
“How many do you have?” he asked her.
“Twenty-five,” she answered. The woman motioned initially toward a low, concrete barn out back where she kept some of them. Then she swept her right arm in front of her, indicating the rest were wherever he might find them.
Suparno led his team around the side of the house into the cramped backyard. Crouching on the dirt, he set down the small, pink pail that held his gear. He took out a plastic bottle of vaccine, then slowly drew the fluid through a tube into an automatic needle. His colleagues produced five black hens from the barn, one by one, and clasped their wings and legs tightly while Suparno injected half a milliliter of vaccine into their breast muscle.
After only a few moments, he rose to his feet and got ready to leave.
“What about the rest of the birds?” I asked him.
“Too hard to catch,” he responded. They might be hiding in the trees or in the crawl space beneath the house.
Then, changing the subject, Suparno and his fellow officers agreed it was time to eat. He invited me to join them. With no irony intended, they suggested a local joint specializing in chicken.
I had come to the province of Central Java to spend several days observing Indonesia’s much-publicized effort at fighting the infection that had been coursing through the country’s flocks for more than a year. Central Java, as its name implies, is at the center of Java island, which, in turn, is home to the majority of Indonesians and has always dominated the country’s politics. My base would be the old royal city of Solo, host to one of Java’s two main sultanates. Solo remains the premier seat of Javanese culture and tradition. So I’d figured, given the political, cultural, and geographic centrality of the city, that the surrounding countryside would be at the forefront of the national campaign to root out the disease.
At first I was encouraged. The chief livestock officer in one nearby district, Sragen, told me how she’d set up a twenty-four-hour bird flu command center. Sri Hardiati, a gregarious yet autocratic woman with a stylish haircut and piercing dark eyes, described how her office monitored poultry outbreaks and even had a small diagnostic lab for dissecting stricken birds. But as I toured the countryside with my assistant, we discovered that containment efforts were just public relations. We had asked to see the vaccination campaign at work. Yet in district after district, livestock officials declined. They said they had none to show us. Finally, after some pestering on our part, Hardiati asked us to accompany her chief vet, Suparno. He made only one stop, pausing long enough to vaccinate the woman’s five black hens. When he bypassed all the other homes in the village, I realized the outing had been simply for my benefit, little more than a photo op.
Over the coming days, we would learn the extent of the ruse. Indonesia’s central government was claiming it provided millions of free vaccine doses for small and midsize Javanese farms and that 98 percent of these had already been used. But local officials and peasants told us this was fiction. “Maybe the farmers get the vaccine. The percentage who use it is small,” said the chief livestock officer in neighboring Karanganyar district. In Boyalali district, the chief livestock officer told me he had a hundred thousand doses in a refrigerator, but no one had asked for any in months. He was content to let them sit there.
As we continued to drive the narrow byways of the Javanese countryside, we were also starting to learn from villagers and local veterinary officers that die-offs among chickens had been occurring much longer than we’d believed. Indonesia had officially confirmed its first poultry outbreak in January 2004, not long after Vietnam and Thailand initially reported theirs. But the local accounts we were hearing contradicted the version we’d been provided back in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. We were fast realizing that Indonesia’s central government had covered up the mounting epidemic for almost half a year, since mid-2003, until it was too late to reverse the tide.
Now, as we explored Central Java in May 2005, Indonesia had still to confirm its first human cases. But that too would change within months when death struck a suburb of Jakarta and Indonesia joined the growing list of countries with casualties. It wouldn’t be long before the death toll in Indonesia outstripped that of anywhere else on Earth.
Yet Indonesia wasn’t alone in concealing the disease. I would come to learn that every Asian country with major outbreaks in livestock had hidden them from view, for months or even longer. The fatal strain’s progress across East Asia had been a journey veiled in secrecy and blessed with neglect. This microbial killer, born in the deep south of China, had repeatedly slipped across international borders over the previous decade, evolving and increasing its virulence until the toll on both people and poultry could no longer be denied.
But even then, when it became untenable for governments to keep up the lie, they often chose to discount the danger rather than mount a serious campaign to defeat it. Instead of attacking the virus, they too often went
