Gambling with Our Lives?
The explosion of H5N1 in early 2004, which led to the deaths of more than 100 million chickens across eight countries in Southeast Asia, was traced to the trade in live birds. The timing and pattern were inconsistent with known migratory bird routes. The initial spread of this disease seems to have been via the railways and highways, not the flyways.
The riskiest segment of trade may be in fighting cocks, transported across borders to be unwilling participants in the high-stakes gambling blood "sport." In cockfighting pits, roosters are set upon one another, often pumped full of steroids and stimulants, with sharpened razors strapped to their legs. The sprays of bloody droplets help ensure that any virus present travels back home after the fights in newly infected birds - or people. A number of cockfighting enthusiasts, and children of cockflghters, have died from H5Nl.
The Thai Department of Disease Control described a case of a young man who had "very close contact to fighting cocks by carrying and helping to clear up the mucus secretion from the throat of the cock during the fighting game by using his mouth." As one leading epidemiologist at the CDC commented dryly, "That was a risk factor for avian flu we hadn't really considered before."
The movement of gaming cocks was directly implicated in the rapid spread of H5Nl. Malaysian government officials blamed cockfighters as the main "culprits" for bringing the disease into their country by taking birds to cockfighting competitions in Thailand and bringing them back intected. Thailand, with an estimated 15 million fighting cocks, was eventually forced to pass a nationwide interim ban on cockfighting. The director of Animal Movement Control and Quarantine within the Thai Department of Livestock Development explained what led to the ban: "When one province that banned cockfights didn't have a second wave outbreak of bird flu and an adjacent province did, it reinforced the belief that the cocks spread disease."
Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)
