Thailand Defends Its Handling of Bird Flu

Soldiers and prisoners were deployed Sunday to help slaughter millions of chickens hit by avian influenza as Thailand’s government sought to deflect criticism that it concealed the spread of the deadly virus for months.

Thailand -- one of two countries where the bird flu has crossed over to infect humans -- is under fire for not moving swiftly to curb the disease, which has exploded across Southeast Asia. Authorities said today that one of three Thai children infected with the virus had died, the first confirmed bird flu death in Thailand and the seventh overall in the outbreak.

Some Thai farmers have likened their government’s approach to bird flu to China’s mishandling of the SARS epidemic last year, when Beijing’s inaction allowed the respiratory disease to spread around the world, killing more than 700 people and causing major economic losses from Singapore to Canada.

The Nation newspaper in Bangkok reported today that the Thai government had concealed test results since November that confirmed the presence of bird flu. Government officials, who announced Friday that tests confirmed the disease in Thailand, denied that they had kept the outbreak secret.

Troops and prison inmates, called in to speed up the killing of nearly 10 million chickens and ducks, went from farm to farm in central Thailand, placing the birds in fertilizer bags 10 at a time and burying them alive.

“The government should have warned us earlier,” poultry farmer Samreung Minthaisong said after soldiers destroyed 27,000 of his chickens. “They tried to cover it up. They did not contain the disease or tell people what was going on. They were worried about exports.”

World Health Organization officials say the rapid destruction of infected flocks is the only way to contain the disease, and they are worried that government inaction has allowed the virus to spread so widely that it will be impossible to eradicate.

The agency fears avian flu could pose a greater threat to humans than SARS if the virus were to become transmissible from one human to another; all the cases identified so far involve transmission from birds to people.

Authorities have confirmed 10 cases of humans coming down with the disease during the current outbreak, including the three in Thailand. Seven of the victims have died, six of them in Vietnam. Thailand’s public health minister said today that the nation has six suspected cases.

The epidemic among chickens has become a regional crisis, affecting at least seven countries. On Sunday, Indonesia became the latest to announce that the virus had infected its poultry. The Indonesian government also denied charges that it had concealed the outbreak.

“The government will not cover it up that Indonesia has now been infected by the avian influenza, which has attacked millions of poultry in Indonesia,” said Sofjan Sudardjat, the Indonesian Agriculture Ministry’s director-general for animal husbandry.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, speaking Sunday to reporters and farmers in the hard-hit province of Suphan Buri, defended his handling of the crisis.

He said the government “suspected about a couple weeks ago” that chickens were dying from bird flu. The government quietly took steps to keep the virus from spreading, he said, but did not warn the public because it did not want to create panic.

“Even though we did not have official results, we acted as if it was bird flu,” he said. But until Friday, the government had blamed the deaths of chickens on a strain of cholera.

In a column today in the Nation newspaper, editor Kavi Chongkittavorn charged that officials had concealed the results of laboratory tests in the hope that they could contain the outbreak without its becoming public and jeopardizing the poultry industry.

Thailand is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of chickens. Following Thailand’s disclosure Friday that its flocks were infected with the virus, its two biggest purchasers, Europe and Japan, banned the import of Thai chickens. On Sunday, China also banned chicken imports from Thailand.

Government spokesman Jakrapob Penkair denied in an interview that there had been any attempt by Thailand to hide the bird epidemic from the public or its trading partners.

“There is no cover-up,” he said. “The reason they didn’t tell the public was that it was far from reality. It wasn’t up to the government to report rumors.”

Jakrapob rejected charges that Thailand’s handling of the bird flu outbreak was similar to China’s initial handling of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

“It’s not comparable,” he said, “because in the case of China, they admitted that they knew there was a disease that can kill people.”

More than 700 farmers, including many who had lost all of their chickens to the disease and subsequent slaughter, gathered at the town hall here in Song Pi Nong, north of Bangkok, the capital, to hear the prime minister explain the government’s handling of the disease.

Among them was Chalauay Sowkiatroong, who said all 5,000 of her chickens were wiped out by illness during a five-day period at the end of December.

She said she called agriculture inspectors as soon as the birds began dying but that officials did not show up until days after all the birds were dead. She said they never tested the chickens to see why they had been sick. Now she fears that she will not receive compensation for her loss.

Despite the farmers’ worries, the popular prime minister soon had the audience applauding and laughing at his jokes. Thaksin, one of Thailand’s wealthiest men, promised the farmers they would be reimbursed for some of their losses but told them, “You have to sacrifice for the country.”

Outside the town hall, hundreds of soldiers marched around in new battle gear: black rubber boots, orange rubber gloves, face masks and shower caps in shades of pink, lavender and lime. As the prime minister spoke, they were dispatched to farms in the surrounding district to continue the destruction of chickens and ducks.

Privately, some farmers said the outbreak began as early as October.

In the village of Bang Le outside Song Pi Nong, farmer Samreung knew something was wrong in November, when his chickens began dying. At first he lost 10 hens a day, then 50. He worried it might be avian influenza, but officials assured everyone that the virus had not reached Thailand.

He spent all his money on medicine for his 30,000 birds, but it didn’t help. A week ago, the illness spread rapidly. In a span of three days, 3,000 hens died.

When the government announced Friday that avian flu had reached Thailand, Samreung was angry but not surprised. On Saturday, 40 soldiers and prisoners arrived and stuffed his remaining chickens into bags and buried them.

Using a backhoe, the soldiers dug a mass grave for the birds extending 100 feet along the side of the road that runs through his farm. The crew was in a hurry and left behind dozens of chickens, which wandered around the property Sunday in defiance of the prime minister’s order.

The soldiers also left about 20 dead chickens lying by the roadside, many of them with their legs sticking straight in the air. As a car approached, a dog ran into the bushes carrying a dead chicken in its mouth.

Samreung said he was skeptical of government promises of assistance and uncertain how he and his family would recover.

“I was very sad and sorry to see those chickens taken away and die,” the 42-year-old farmer said as he surveyed his empty henhouses.

“Those chickens were our future. We put everything into those chickens. Now everything is gone.”