THAILAND: Fear of Bird Flu Abates, Experts Advise Caution

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 16 2004 (IPS) - Along the street corners of the sprawling Thai capital, residents can once again take in the smoky fragrance of chicken being grilled in homespun braziers.

This local dish – chicken is often eaten with a spicy papaya salad and sticky rice – is back among the variety of smells coming from the carts of food vendors, one of the hints suggesting that Thais are returning in droves to dine on chicken.

In other localities too, such as a market in an older section of the Thai capital, open trays with spicy chicken have inched their way back to stands next to trays full of assorted delicacies, such as curried pumpkin, fried fish and minced pork.

These are welcome signs for health officials, proof that Thais who shunned eating chicken or eggs for months until recently are getting over their fear of the once-rampaging bird flu.

”More people are getting used to the idea that bird flu is on the decline,” Dr Somchai Peerapakorn, an epidemiologist at the Thai division of the World Health Organisation (WHO), told IPS. ”And we see that in the increasing number of people eating chicken.”

A poll conducted over the weekend reported that 89.1 percent of Bangkok residents and surrounding areas said that they were now no longer afraid to eat well-cooked chicken.

A total of 60.2 percent of respondents were confident of the safety of the chicken they ate, compared to 37.3 percent who said they were not so confident and 2.3 percent who were not confident at all.

This, however, was not the case a month ago, when fear of the bird flu infection drove people away from eating poultry, be it on the street or in restaurants. Even high-profile publicity stunts led by the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra failed to coax the public that properly cooked chicken was safe to eat.

In February, Thaksin churned up a chicken dish at a national chicken-cooking and eating festival and dropped into an outlet of the multinational fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken here to chow down in the media’s glare.

Besides the drop in the screaming headlines in the local press over avian flu, there are other signs that explain why chicken consumption is going back to normal. These include the marginal number of new patients being monitored under Thailand’s bird flu surveillance system as suspected cases of the fatal disease.

Currently, according to Dr Somchai, the suspected cases being put under observation at hospitals across the country are ”zero to one a day.” In mid-February, when avian flu was raging, there were 10 to 20 patients a day being placed under the medical throughout this South-east Asian nation.

Since December, when signs of bird flu emerged, close to 600 patients were detected by the surveillance system as possible cases of this virus that was killing poultry in the thousands.

After Vietnam, which accounted for 15 deaths due to bird flu, Thailand was the worst- hit country. There were seven fatalities out of 11 cases of the disease confirmed by medical laboratories.

During this outbreak, Thailand placed over two-thirds of the country’s 76 provinces under various levels of quarantine to contain the lethal H5N1 virus, which is transmitted through the air and is released in nasal secretions and the faeces of infected birds.

Across Asia, eight countries were infected by the rampaging disease, in addition to Vietnam and Thailand. Close to 100 millions chickens were slaughtered or died due to the flu.

Experts however said that Asian countries handled the bird flu in a better way than it did the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). “Compared to the uncertainly and fears caused by SARS, developing Asia has handled the avian flu in a pragmatic confident, and calm manner,” the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB) said in a special report on the avian flu.

The news that bird flu is on the wane has already prompted Bangkok to try restoring back to health Thailand’s beleaguered chicken export industry, valued at 1.2 billion U.S. dollars.

Over the weekend, Deputy Agriculture Minister Newin Chidchob told reporters that Japan and South Korea are once again turning to the Thai chicken industry for their poultry needs.

The government has also announced that it will soon declare victory over bird flu.

Further, the country’s small chicken farmers, most of them among the rural poor, are also due to benefit from a plan unveiled by the government over the weekend to give land and soft loans to restart their devastated farms. Nearly 3.5 million people are in the small poultry sector.

However, the two U.N. agencies that have been in the forefront of the battle against avian flu, the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), as well as the AsDB, are urging governments like Thailand to be more cautious about the lethal disease.

”Going too fast to declare a country free of bird flu can be counterproductive,” says Dr Somchai. ”After this scale of an outbreak, we need more time, we need to be cautious, before saying it is over.”

He talks in terms of many months, if not ”at least two years” of monitoring, before one can safely assert triumph over the virus. “It is likely that the impact of the avian flu epidemic will be felt for at least six to nine months’ duration,” says the AsDB report, entitled ‘Avian Flu: An Economic Assessment for Selected Developing Countries in Asia’.

A report in the English-language ‘The Nation’ newspaper Friday of a possible fresh outbreak of avian flu in small poultry farms in Uttaradit in northern Thailand serves as a warning to the Thai government over complacency in the bird flu crisis.

As the AsDB report says: “The outbreak of avian flu once again demonstrates the need for developing Asia to be prepared to face unexpected shocks at all times.”