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Bird Flu Crisis: Travel and Danger in a Mixing World
By Sandip Roy, PNS
The fast-moving chicken flu striking Asia has India and other countries
on edge. Many governments' responses resemble countermeasures to terrorism, with travelers
pegged as potential carriers of biological destruction.
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KOLKATA, India - January 28, 2004 - Usually the dour official at the Kolkata airport
barks, "Any gold? Electronics? Computer?" But
this time, when I landed in India from America via Singapore, he was more interested in
the food I was carrying. Cooked food from abroad, especially from Southeast Asia, is now
suspect. In the age of the bird flu, I have been upgraded from potential electronics
smuggler to a disease vector.
In a world of collapsing boundaries, as flights from every
corner of the globe disgorged passengers into the transit lounge of Singapore's Changi
International Airport, alarmed officials try desperately to guard their borders against
diseases that spread at Boeing speed. The duty free shop in San Francisco warned that beef
jerky purchased there had to be consumed before landing in Seoul, since South Korea had
just banned American beef products. At Hong Kong, large signs asked passengers if they had
a persistent cough and flu-like symptoms. In Singapore, airport officials peered into a
monitor as each deplaning passenger passed through what looked like an X-ray machine.
But the flu rages through Southeast Asia, claiming another
six-year-old in Bangkok and 4 million chickens in Karachi, Pakistan, making mincemeat of
the governments' efforts to corner it. For the anti-globalization activists, departing
from the recently concluded World Social Forum in Mumbai, the bird flu is another potent
reminder of how difficult it is to de-globalize the world once the genie has left the
bottle.
India, however, is trying to seal its boundaries against
the flu, which is front-page news, topping upcoming India-Pakistan peace talks in
February. In fact, the bird flu has brought a bit of a chill in the recent thaw between
the two prickly neighbors. Even as Indian and Pakistani bureaucrats plan talks on
everything from Kashmir to drug trafficking and the countries resume air flights between
each other, New Delhi is contemplating a ban on all poultry from Pakistan, where a strain
of the flu killed the chickens. Indian newspapers are already dubbing it the Karachi flu.
The ritzy Taj Hotel in Kolkata tries to reassure foreign patrons by having
a microbiologist examine each chicken. In Vietnam, Kentucky Fried Chicken is
offering fried fish instead of chicken.
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In an age where terrorism is conducted by stateless
actors like Al Qaeda, the bird flu has proved just as elusive. Governments are trying to
counter it on a war footing. The Animal Resources Development Minister in India has just
announced a "massive hunt" for evidence of any suspected case. In Thailand,
soldiers and prisoners have been pressed into service, culling chickens in the 13
provinces where the flu has been detected. But even as Thai Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra claimed that almost all the chickens in the outbreak areas have been
slaughtered, neighboring Laos confirmed that the flu had spread to that country.
Globalization, which had greased the path for the free
movement of goods across borders, whether pirated copies of "The Lord of the
Rings" or Big Macs, now finds that diseases like SARS and the bird flu come in their
wake. The World Health Organization is holding its breath, warning that if the Asian bird
flu meets and mates with another human influenza virus moving toward the region, it could
trigger a global pandemic that could kill millions of people.
Faced with that possibility, governments are reduced to
literally counting their chickens after they are hatched. In India, health officials are
trying to force hatcheries to maintain a daily record of dying birds and clinically
establish the cause of death of each one. It's the poultry equivalent of cleaning the
Augean stables in a country as vast as India. Meanwhile, the ritzy Taj Hotel in Kolkata is
trying to reassure its foreign patrons by having a microbiologist examine each chicken. In
Vietnam, Kentucky Fried Chicken, a popular hangout for foreigners, is offering fried fish
instead of chicken. Singapore is banning the public from its seven poultry farms.
As confidence-building measures, they seem puny and
bureaucratic. India, which had been largely sanguine through the mad cow scare because its
millions of Hindus don't eat beef anyway, is not yet hysterical about the chicken flu. But
Arambag Hatcheries, a popular purveyor of chicken parts, is reporting a dip in sales.
Arambag had pioneered western-supermarket style sales of
chicken parts -- boneless thighs separate from chicken breasts. But customers are going
back to more traditional sources for chicken, ones where they know for sure the bird
didn't die of some mysterious illness. At the market next to my family's home in Kolkata,
white chickens squished against each other in wire-mesh cages peck at their feed, while
shoppers point out the one they want. The chicken seller hauls one squawking bird out and
with one swift stroke chops off its head. "Look, it's so fresh it's still kicking. No
flu here," he says, as the headless bird jerks and twitches in a pool of blood and
feathers.
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