These are times when a sneeze in Bangkok can set alarm bells ringing in fifty different locations in the world. At the moment the world is watching Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta, Beijing, as indeed the whole of Southeast Asia, very, very closely given the bird flu threat. Which is both a bad thing and a good thing. Bad, because there is a sensational aspect to this obsessive monitoring of microbes — fanned no doubt by an international media in the every present search of a “breaking news” story — that is not in the interests of either good science or good sense. Good, because it forces the authorities and the world community to actually address a potential disaster before it actually takes on Frankensteinian proportions as happens so often. In other words, the best way to handle this threat is not to flap in panic over it or crow with complacency over having addressed it, because both approaches lead to a lack of perspective. Of the two, complacency is certainly the more dangerous, since it delays adequate response from the authorities and leaves the public in a cocoon of ignorance until reality catches up at some point. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to brazen it out and landed in a right royal fowl soup. He actually sat down to a well-publicised and humongous chicken dinner, complete with chicken sate and peanut sauce, to send a message to the world that Thailand’s poultry were disease free. But before he could even have digested that meal, reports of people having died of bird flu started trickling in. Not surprisingly, widespread public anger over the cover up followed. Instead of eating that dinner before television cameras, Shinawatra would have been better employed informing his fellow citizens about how they could have protected themselves against the disease. India has yet to face this test. For the moment, the animal husbandry authorities have discounted the possibility of the disease hitting this country. Comforting reasons — as for instance the fact that India does not import chicken or eggs — have been advanced to drive home the point. All of this is very reassuring but it must not lead to that lethal, it-can’t-happen-to-us complacency. In a country that is said to be among the the top egg and chicken producers in the world, the systems of monitoring, regulation and prevention should be on full alert.
