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Hong Kong's 1997 experience alerted the world to the dangers of bird flu and offered a lesson on how to control it: kill sick chickens, and do it as fast as possible. That lesson obviously didn't sink in. Vietnam, the third country to acknowledge the presence of bird flu (after South Korea and Japan) in December, had outbreaks as far back as July. Birds started dropping dead in Thailand in early November, but the government insisted until last week that the chickens merely had a bacterial ailment. Heavily populated Indonesia has been hard hit but refused to cull any of its flocks until last week.
The virus probably originates in southern China, but no one knows how it has spread so widely. Transport of infected birds to chicken farms is one theory, but it's also possible that migratory birds such as ducks and geese are spreading it through their droppings. "Did birds in Hong Kong, which nest in Siberia and North Korea, somehow spread the virus elsewhere?" asks Robert Webster, an expert in animal influenzas at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. "That's a frightening possibility." If H5N1 does evolve into a flu that humans can spread, a vaccine could be developed but would take months. "Once you know this virus can spread from human to human, region to region," says Dr. Yi Guan, a SARS and avian-flu expert at the University of Hong Kong, "it's already too late."
Dissembling and stalling by local governments have already allowed the pathogen to spread in Asia--not only in birds but also among the men and women who raise them for a living and the kids who gather eggs or simply kick up infected dust in their villages. "If I had known about the bird flu," says Roongroj Boontang, the uncle who allowed Kaptan Boonmanuj to play with his fighting roosters, "my nephew would still be alive." --Reported by Andrew Perrin/Ben Ya Pad, Karl Taro Greenfeld and Bryan Walsh/Hong Kong and David Bjerklie/New York