The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of the Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic by Alan Sipress

Author:Alan Sipress [Sipress, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101145517
Google: PDq9Tf-eevkC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7630130
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2020-04-14T05:00:00+00:00

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,

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