THAILAND: Bird Flu Jab Ban Settles Scores For Time Being

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 17 2004 (IPS) - By declaring a ban on vaccinating poultry against bird flu, the Thai government has ended a passionate debate between the country’s chicken-meat exporters and breeders of fighting cocks for sport.

Bangkok’s decision this week is winning approval from animal health experts and the media in the wake of uncertainty over the past two months on which policy – to vaccinate or not – was best for Thailand.

”It is a good decision, since we have seen very sporadic outbreaks of avian influenza (in Thailand) to implement a vaccination strategy,” Hans-Gerhard Wagner, senior animal production and health officer at Asia-Pacific regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IPS.

Wagner also welcomed the government’s decision on Wednesday to permit vaccination experiments with selected types of birds. ”There is nothing against selective vaccination if it is done under strict supervision,” he said.

”The restriction effectively ends the public confusion over an issue that has dragged on for much longer than it should have been allowed,” commented ‘The Nation’ daily newspaper in an editorial on Friday.

In announcing the move, Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng said that the decision stemmed from concerns over public health and economic consequences.

According to the FAO, vaccinating poultry becomes acceptable if a country is hit by a massive outbreak of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza or if there is a possible threat from a neighbouring country. The U.N. food agency also supports such measures when there is a need to conduct a vaccine programme for birds in controlled settings, like pets or those in a zoo.

But this week’s decision is not going down well with Thais involved in the country’s fighting cock culture, since they had led the call for vaccination as a better form of prevention against bird flu than the current practise of culling.

”We are disappointed by the decision. We have no way out and for now we will have to support the government,” Chai Wacharonke, vice president of the Association of Fighting Cocks’ Career Promotion, said in an interview.

”The people who wanted vaccines banned are from Bangkok and they have no idea what is happening in the rural areas, where fighting cock breeders wanted their chickens vaccinated,” he added.

Fighting cocks are an integral part of Thailand’s rural culture, often serving as a source of entertainment in villages that have little outlets for pleasure. Duels between the birds also feed the country’s voracious appetite for gambling.

”This is an old animal sport in Thaialnd, going back almost 700 years,” says Chai, who, like other breeders, fear this special species is under threat if the birds are forced to be slaughtered due to bird flu.

On Monday, Thailand was witness to the passion that runs between the two camps – the fighting cock breeders and the people who produce chicken for the food industry – when both groups converged at the Ministry of Agriculture to make their case.

These demonstrators, numbering in the hundreds, had shouted at each other and almost came to blows.

The first sparks of rage emerged in July, when the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawtra gave its backing for a bird-flu vaccination programme.

That was a clear shift in policy to what the Thaksin administartion had maintained at the beginning of this year, when two thirds of Thailand’s 76 provinces were hit by the lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu. Bangkok declared a ban on vaccinating poultry from the disease.

It opted, instead, towards culling poultry that were infected or that were in areas where the disease was on the rampage.

Since Thailand was hit with bird flu this year, its lucrative chicken exporting sector has taken a beating, with the European Union (EU), the second major importer of Thai chicken products, freezing its orders in February.

This week, the country’s leading chicken importer, Japan, threatened to stop importing Thai chicken meat if the Bangkok approved the vaccination of poultry against bird flu.

Thailand is the world’s fourth largest poultry exporter, with earnings last year of about 1.2 billion U.S. dollars. Of that, 60 percent was from exports to Japan, while about 30 percent was from the EU.

Thailand was among the worst affected countries when bird flu swept through Asia at the beginning of the year. By the end of March, over 100 million chickens had been slaughtered or died due to the disease in eight Asian countries, which included China, Indonesia and Vietnam – in addition to Thailand.

The H5N1 virus’ toll on people troubled public health officials. There were 15 deaths due to avian flu in Vietnam and seven fatalities in Thailand.

The second outbreak of the disease in July has added to those worries, since there have been fatalities in Vietnam and Thailand again. The current death toll in Asia due to bird flu stands at 28.

Bird flu, which is transmitted through the air and is released in nasal secretion and the faeces of infected birds, caused alarm in 1997 after an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of the virus killed six people in Hong Kong.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) fears that the disease could evolve into a pandemic with a more devastating impact than AIDS, due to the ease with which the lethal influenza could spread and because humans do not have a natural immunity against the H5N1 virus.

On Monday, the head of WHO’s Western Pacific division echoed this concern during a meeting in China. ”Virtually nobody has the immunity against the new virus if it developed through the process of assorting between human and avian viruses,” the WHO official told the Chinese state media.