Fowl breeder Chen Huaping thinks SARS, as flu-like infections go, is mere chickenfeed. He witnessed the wrath of bird flu -- potentially more infectious -- last October, when a freshly bought yellow duckling dropped dead in his backyard 30km outside the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Within a week, the bug had wiped out 300 of his 500 baby ducks.
"I took the body to a veterinarian and he said, `If they catch a flu, you might as well just let them die off. You can't cure it.' When they die, they die fast."
No need to tell that to breeders devastated by avian flu this winter in South Korea, Japan and most alarmingly Vietnam, where the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed a week ago that the bug had hurdled the species barrier and killed at least three people.
Chen, 45, boasts that he has never fallen sick on the farm. But his lifestyle is the sort that makes epidemiologists cringe. He lives beside a mucky pond in a tree bark cabin abutting a corrugated steel shelter, where the ducks waddle up the banks to feed and scatter their droppings on the way down.
Small farms like his, squalid and teeming with fetid animals, are widely believed to make southern China and other densely populated areas across Asia cauldrons for lethal new flu strains.
SARS, the flu-like illness that first swept out of Guangdong last year to claim 800 lives around the globe, was only the latest warning sign. In response to new suspected cases, Guangdong has declared war on the civet cat and similar species, based on lab evidence that they harbor a coronavirus similar to the SARS pathogen. Rats, meanwhile, are the target of a spring cleanup drive.
But the rural breeding grounds for mutant flu offshoots have not changed. Scientists, though often stymied in their attempts to connect the dots, commonly point to a triangle of contagion linking man, bird and swine.
As the theory goes, viruses of farmers and fowl may co-mingle or trade genes. An avian flu by-product can then incubate in pigs, which in turn re-infect humans.
Farmers and traders go on to mix with city folk who hop the globe by jet, while trucks haul their teeming flocks to faraway locales.
"A pandemic influenza is certainly much bigger than SARS," said microbiologist Malik Peiris, a SARS expert at the University of Hong Kong.
The prospect of the next big pandemic haunts Southeast Asia. "Asian Flu" in 1957-58 and "Hong Kong Flu" in 1967-68 killed 4.5 million people combined. Scientists in recent years have even traced the 1918-19 "Spanish flu" pandemic, in which 40 million to 50 million people perished, back to southern China.
Doctors emphasize that Guangdong, home to 90 million people, is but one of many places where new viral diseases may emerge. The deadly West Nile and Ebola viruses broke out in Africa.
"But what is unique in the southern China region or that part of Asia is the live animal market scenario. They can exchange viruses, they can amplify within those markets and you have humans coming into repeated contact with animals, a wide diversity of people," Peiris said.
This month's civet cull marked what many observers consider the first serious crackdown on unhygienic markets in Guangzhou. Many experts said it was long overdue.
But no one from local quarantine stations ever visited Chen's farm. He never considered using vaccines before. Since the plague that struck his ducklings, Chen has sworn by a common vaccine. It costs 50 yuan (US$6) for 500 doses worth of the concoction, as thick as rubber cement.
Ideally, the farmer would build some distance between him and his ducks. But he insists monster rats would have a feeding frenzy at night if he lived any further away.
Unless his boss coughed up the cash to erect a duck island in the middle of the pond. "Maybe that would be more sanitary. They would not have to step in their own dung."
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