Bird flu panic hits China amid fears of global pandemic

The nightmare of deadly bird flu, which Chinese health officials prayed they would not have to face, has struck five provinces and possibly the financial capital, Shanghai.

And at the centre of the meltdown in Asia's vast poultry industry is a 61-year-old multi-billionaire called Dhanin Chearavanont who turned a small family business, Charoen Pokphand Group, into the world's largest chicken producer and animal-feed miller. At risk in the bird flu crisis is not just the company's £5bn annual sales of animal feed, chickens, eggs, ducks as well as shrimp and fish but a revolution in the eating habits of billions of people.

Condemned for keeping quiet about Sars for several months, China has also been accused of covering up outbreaks of the bird flu which has killed eight people across Asia so far. Yesterday it ordered a mass slaughter of chickens, ducks and other domestic fowl.

Officials said the virus was present in Hubei and Hunan provinces as well as the southern region of Guanxi. Further outbreaks are suspected in Anhui and Guangdong, the southern province where Sars was born. In Guangdong, where people live with their chickens and other animals, the fear is that the virus may link with human flu to produce a strain that could sweep a world where people have no immunity to it.

Chia Ek Chow, who adopted a Thai name, Dhanin Chearavanont, is the man who brought the American-style battery chicken farming pioneered by Tyson foods to Thailand, which helped make chicken so cheap it now rivals pork in popularity.

Mr Chearavanont has invested billions in China, where growing affluence has quintupled meat consumption in the past 20 years. Thousands of Kentucky Fried Chicken branches have opened to cater for a diet which could turn China into a massive food importer within a decade.

Thailand's agribusiness did so well, other countries including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, Burma, and even Russia have tried to follow suit and introduce intensive rearing techniques, and 10 of them have now reported outbreaks of avian flu.

When huge numbers of chickens, or pigs, are reared in densely packed sheds, sometimes 50,000 in two-storey sheds with poor ventilation, they are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as cholera, TB and avian influenza. Many of these diseases, including foot-and-mouth, are endemic in Thailand and China, every year. The real threat comes when the intensive breeding allows new varieties to spread quickly and to jump to humans who live near the animals. A new strain could start a pandemic like the influenza which killed millions after the First World War. A new type of the foot-and-mouth virus set off the crisis in Britain three years ago and is suspected of coming from China or India.

The dangers of this new strain of avian flu virus are still unknown but so far H5N1 has shown no sign of being able to spread from humans to humans. All those who have died or fallen sick are workers in close contact with animals.

But in 1997, human transmission was blamed for six deaths in Hong Kong. And it seems to be spreading fast so that for the first time since 1925, even Japan has reported an outbreak. The fact that these diseases, and new ones such as Sars, can evolve all the time makes it difficult to immunise the animals effectively. Most of Thai chickens are immunised against cholera, for example.

Indonesia plans to vaccinate its infected flocks, rather than resort to widespread culling. This is what the UN is recommending but most countries have killed all chickens within a three-kilometre radius of an outbreak. Slaughtering is thought to be a better way of reassuring the public. Thailand risks losing exports to Japan and the EU worth $1.5bn if the import bans remain. The knock-on damage to Thailand's reputation would also hit its other food exports such as shrimps and affect a tourism industry recovering from the Sars crisis.

There is little or no known risk of the disease being caught by consumers buying imported chicken in the supermarket. Yet Thailand could easily lose its market share to eastern European countries as they join the trading bloc and apply EU veterinary standards. The EU had been increasing pressure to adopt the standards after EU inspectors in China found an indiscriminate use of antibiotics in chicken and fish-farming, including drugs banned in Europe as carcinogenic.