The Monster at Our Door by Mike Davis

Author:Mike Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588531
Publisher: The New Press

Table 8.1.

Covering-up the Epidemic

Country Official Admission Actual Onset

S. Korea 12/12/03

Vietnam 1/8/04 10/03

Japan 1/12/04

Thailand 1/23/04 11/03

Cambodia 1/24/04

China 1/27/04 early 03

Laos 1/27/04

Indonesia 2/2/04 8/03

The government of Vietnam, previously praised by the WHO for its competent handling of the SARS outbreak, was altogether more cooperative, but the country’s poverty and the dispersed character of its largely backyard poultry industry posed huge obstacles to creating effective viral firebreaks. Poor farmers suppressed news of infections and concealed valuable birds such as fighting cocks; in addition, in face of rising anger in the countryside, the government was reluctant to extend the radius of culls around sick flocks beyond one half kilometer—the WHO recommended three kilometers—or to exterminate the domestic ducks that were the infection’s probable reservoir. Similarly, the disinfection of farms and the disposal of contaminated poultry manure were Sisyphean tasks that always risked further transmission of the virus, typically via the boots or clothing of cleanup workers. No sooner was an outbreak suppressed in one part of the country than another appeared in a different province. Small children, who frequently played outside with chickens and ducks and were constantly exposed to poultry waste, were particularly vulnerable to these seemingly ineradicable village outbreaks.198

Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, meanwhile, balked at the task of killing millions of chickens, and so her government initially proposed a vaccination campaign instead. After angry protests from the rest of the ASEAN bloc, Indonesia finally agreed to slaughter birds, but with a half-heartedness that reassured few critics. The WHO, however, continued to have the most difficulty with Beijing. “We have repeatedly said there is a brief window of opportunity to act within China,” warned a WHO representative at the beginning of February 2004, “This latest news [outbreaks in Hunan and Hubei] strongly suggests that the window is getting smaller with each passing day.” Another WHO official told the Associated Press that “mass culling is not taking place at the speed we consider absolutely necessary to contain the virus.”199 The Lancet, for its part, warned in February that China’s “animal-disease surveillance is as good as absent, a vacuum into which global health might hopelessly and terrifyingly fall.”200 When leading influenza expert Robert Webster suggested in another Lancet article that the time had come to consider closing down China’s live-animal markets, he was ignored.201

February was, indeed, a terrifying month, with new human victims in Vietnam and Thailand and further avian outbreaks in China and Indonesia. WHO teams, reinforced with a cadre of top experts from American, European, and Japanese laboratories, struggled with the imminent possibility of a global pandemic against which the world would have little protection. An experimental vaccine developed in 1997 was ineffective against GenZ, which was also resistant to amantadine, the cheapest and most common antiviral. (Hong Kong researchers feared this was further evidence of human tampering in the evolution of H5N1 and urged an investigation of chicken feed to test for amantadine-like molecules.)202

Most disturbingly, the new strain was more lethal than any influenza in scientific experience. In the course of the

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