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At his HKU office overlooking the south China Sea, Guan fishes a cigarette from his pack of Mild Sevens and sighs, rubbing his forehead. A research paper he has been working on for years, a document he says will explain where the H5N1 virus came from and how it has become so entrenched in much of Asia, has just been rejected by a major scientific journal. That's part of life for any research scientist, and Guan is confident that the paper will soon be picked up by another journal. Still, he is taking the blow personally. "A paper is just a paper, but this is something that's important for the whole world," says the researcher, who was born in mainland China. "If a pandemic occurs, no matter how developed this world is, it would suddenly shut down," he says. "And I know it's coming."
Messianic complexes aren't unusual among lite medical researchers, though few are as vocal about it as Guan, who will tell listeners that his work will help save us all. But then, few scientists have Guan's credentials. It was Guan who identified civets as the major reservoir of the SARS virus, convincing Chinese officials in Guangzhou to cull the animals in January 2004. That helped to prevent a possible second SARS outbreak. Guan has been just as key with H5N1: he heads the Joint Influenza Research Center, a project between HKU and Shantou University in China's southern Guangdong province, that has helped to give scientists the most accurate picture yet of how H5N1 has evolved and spread. "Guan Yi is a very bright guy," says Robert Webster, a renowned flu expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. "He talks a million miles a minute, and a lot of the stuff you don't even understand, but he is extremely dedicated."
Guan is important not just because of who he is but where he is. With its densely packed populations of animals and humans, southern China is the traditional birthplace of influenza. The last two pandemics, of 1968 and 1957, originated there as avian-flu viruses that mutated and eventually passed into people. That's what happened in Hong Kong in 1997 with H5N1, as the virus first spread directly from sick poultry into human beings, infecting 18 people and killing six—an outbreak that was halted only when officials culled all 1.5 million of the territory's chickens. Later, Guan and his HKU colleagues—including Malik Peiris, who discovered the SARS coronavirus—helped to trace the origin of the new, more dangerous strain of H5N1 back to a single Guangdong goose.
Getting accurate intelligence about H5N1 in southern China—where it was concentrated until bird flu exploded throughout Southeast Asia at the end of 2003—is vital to understanding the virus. But Beijing has traditionally been reluctant to share information about infectious diseases with the rest of the world. Nevertheless, with his mainland connections and his base in Shantou, Guan has been able to keep HKU supplied with a steady stream of bird-flu viruses. That has enabled his lab to monitor how H5N1 is changing and how close it may be to mutating into more virulent and communicable strains. Using technicians who roam markets and poultry farms, Guan's team has taken more than 100,000 samples from birds throughout the country, from which they've sequenced over 250 different strains of H5N1. "Guan is our connection to China," says Yuen Kwok-yung, the head of the microbiology department at HKU. "By tracing the virus in surveillance, we can know what the best vaccine would be, if it did trigger a pandemic."
Acting outside Beijing's regimented official disease-response system, Guan and his team occasionally clash with China's Ministry of Agriculture, which maintains the country has been able to control avian flu through mass poultry vaccinations and strict government surveillance. When Guan's paper in Nature concluded that the genetic markers of the viruses found in the Qinghai outbreak pointed to southern China as the likely source, the Ministry's chief veterinary officer, Jia Youling, criticized Guan's conclusions and the quality of his research in an interview with the Asian Wall Street Journal. A spokesperson for the ministry told Time that the Shantou lab had failed safety standards under new rules established for mainland labs, a charge Guan denies. "This fighting has hurt me a lot, and damaged my progress in China," he says. "But in my mind I feel comfortable, because I do nothing wrong."
Ministry officials briefly investigated the Shantou lab, although HKU's Yuen says the Center is clarifying its status with Beijing, and bird-flu work there is continuing. But the minor spat underscores how flawed disease surveillance remains in China, where local officials treat epidemic data as state secrets unless Beijing orders disclosure. While WHO officials are quick to praise Beijing for its overall improvement in dealing with epidemics since the SARS outbreak more than two years ago, there continue to be frustrations. In Qinghai, for example, Beijing was slow to share samples taken from the outbreak site and turned down offers by international experts to help to coordinate research—especially surveillance work that would have looked for the virus in healthy birds, the prime candidates to spread flu via migration. (Birds sensitive to H5N1 would likely be too sick to migrate.) Yet when a much smaller outbreak of avian flu in wild birds was detected in Mongolia last month, the government welcomed a surveillance team from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The team's preliminary results showed little evidence that large numbers of healthy birds were carrying the virus.
That's good news, but researchers still need a full account of what happened at Qinghai Lake. Some of those answers may come soon when China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, which did manage to conduct some research at the site, publishes its work. Juan Lubroth of the FAO, who has seen their data, says Beijing's slow reaction was due to bureaucratic red tape rather than deliberate deception, and believes the government will respond more comprehensively to the next outbreak. That might make Guan Yi's brand of maverick virology a little less necesary, but he insists he won't stop hunting the virus. "If we face this disease, and help each other, we have a chance to control it," he says. "But if we avoid it, and miss the chance to control it, we'll end up far worse than [we were] with SARS."