ASIA: All Eyes on Thailand’s Efforts at Containing Bird Flu

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 11 2004 (IPS) - After being reduced to a symbol of failure for its initial attempts to conceal reports of bird flu, Thailand finds itself wearing a different mantle – that of being the first of the badly affected countries in the region to have contained the disease.

This change of fortunes emerged Monday, following official confirmation that Thailand had not detected new cases of bird flu in the last remaining danger zone, a neighbourhood in Bangkok that had infected poultry.

”There are no red zones anymore in Thailand, but we must wait and see if there are signs of new infection in the next few weeks,” Hans-Gerhard Wagner, the ranking animal production and health officer at the Asia-Pacific office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IPS.

That surveillance period lasts 21 days, Wagner added. ”If there are no signs of bird flu after that, we can shout victory. And that would make Thailand the first success among the badly affected countries in the region.”

The FAO official credited Thailand’s mass culling of infected poultry and birds in infected farms for this success 16 days after the government, under mounting international and local criticism of a ”cover up,” confirmed that the country was hit by bird flu.

Close to 26 million chickens in 43 of Thailand’s 76 provinces have either been culled or died due to the deadly virus, which contains the H5N1 strain.

Thailand, which has had five deaths due to the disease, and Vietnam, with 14 deaths, were among the worst affected of Asia’s countries hit by the flu. The other countries are Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, South Korea and Taiwan. Pakistan has confirmed another strain – H7 – of avian influenza. Yet international and local public health authorities are worried by the current rush by some government officials to interpret this glimmer of success into something more – that this South-east Asian country has certainly triumphed over avian flu.

”We are concerned if economic issues are taking precedence over human health,” John Rainford, spokesman for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Thailand office, said in an interview.

It echoes what public health ministry official had said earlier. ”The Agriculture Ministry’s rapid move to reduce areas with bird flu from red to yellow overnight is a cause for concern,” a senior health official was quoted as having told Tuesday’s ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper.

Both the WHO and Thai health officials are worried that people involved in culling chickens and those in small poultry farms may be caught up in a second wave of the bird flu.

These cautionary words followed the cheerleading of Newin Chidchob, deputy minister of agriculture, who urged Thais over the weekend to consider it an act of patriotism to consume chicken and eggs.

Such a chicken test of loyalty to king and country was in keeping with the tone set by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to eat his way – using chicken – into the hearts of the Thai public.

On Saturday, the prime minister led Thais in a national chicken-cooking and eating festival: 200 tonnes of chicken were dished out freely in all 76 provinces across the country.

Prior to that, Thaksin tried to tempt Thais back into the delights of chicken and eggs by being photographed eating chicken with his ministers after the weekly cabinet meetings and indulging in a chow down at a Bangkok outlet of the U.S. fastfood chain Kentucky Fried Chicken.

However, opinion polls and analysts reveal that a wary Thai public has not been swayed by the government’s appeals to patriotism or the publicity stunts. ”Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra can eat chicken in front of the cameras until it comes out of his ears or he grows feathers, but it will not greatly affect the public perception that it is unsafe to eat poultry,” Boonsong Kositchotethana wrote in an analysis in Wednesday’s ‘Bangkok Post.’

Earlier, a nationwide poll conducted by the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce revealed that 80 percent of the 1,448 consumers surveyed had switched to eating only pork or seafood.

The public’s lack of faith in government assurances about the safety of Thai chickens can be traced to the charges that have dogged the government since late January that Bangkok had ”covered up” details of bird flu rampaging through the country since late last year.

The European Union (EU) has been among the harshest critics, accusing Bangkok of a ”disgraceful” act in ”misinforming” David Byrne, the EU’s health and consumer protection commissioner, about bird flu in the country.

Thailand’s Senate, in fact, plans to grill the government over the cover-up in hearings to commence soon. Further, the Senate hopes to conduct independent studies to verify if the poultry in the country are as safe as the government proclaims.

”We are worried about another cover-up; that the government may say chickens are safe to satisfy the big companies rather than caring for the small farmers,” Nirand Pithakwatchara, chairman of the Senate’s committee on social development and human security, told IPS. ”This issue is more than about food safety. It is about security for the people, the farmers.”

As the world’s fourth largest exporter of chickens, Thailand shipped close to 540,000 metric tonnes of chicken meat, valued at 1.25 billion U.S. dollars, to its foreign markets last year.

An estimated 70 percent of chicken products come from three percent of farms, which are large, private sector ventures, while the rest come from the small poultry farms. Some 3.5 million people make up the small poultry sector.

According to the FAO, international investigators have still to fathom how the bird flu virus – which is transmitted through the air and is released in nasal secretions and the faeces of infected birds – spread across Asia in such a swift and unprecedented manner, affecting so many countries in such a short time.

Among the suspects under scrutiny are migratory birds from Siberia that head south along the ”waterfowl flyways in Asia,” an area that covers the stretches of land where the bulk of the infected chickens are kept in coops.