About the only wet part of the Hong Kong “wet” market, it turned out, was the freshly hosed-down textured tile floor. Even the third floor, where the poultry vendors were located, was conspicuously free of bird droppings or other icky stuff. Sure, there was bird poop in a tray under the bottoms of their cages, and the cages were stacked five or six high.
But leave it to Hong Kong, the market seemed as hygienic as such a place can possibly be, right down to the dispenser of bacterial hand gel near the exit.
Senior Health Inspector Sin Chiu-hong, in a clean, white-shirted uniform, told me that every 25 days, the poultry vendors have a compulsory “rest” day. They cull (read: kill) all their birds, shut down, and the whole floor is cleaned and disinfected. They have to do this – even though their chickens are vaccinated against avian flu – or risk losing their vendor license.
In addition, inspectors walk around every day the market is open, checking for sick birds.
“If the chicken is sick, the crown turns purple and its nose runs, and it hides in a corner of the cage,” Sin explained.
No wonder. That bird would be toast. Its, ahem, fluids and solids would be sampled, then it would be killed and laid to rest in a big green tight-lidded trash can. If its infection turned out to be H5N1 avian flu, all the birds from that market, healthy or not, would be toast. And if, even worse, the H5N1 infection showed up in a sick bird at another of Hong Kong’s 100 wet markets, then all the chickens in Hong Kong would be toast.
The last time a sick bird was found to be infected with the dreaded H5N1 avian flu was in 2003.
But with all these precautions, Hong Kong’s fresh chicken biz has lost its pluck. About half of the 800 vendors who operated in 2001 have voluntarily sold their licenses back to the government, Sin said. In the market we visited, three out of six stalls were vacant.
The woman I watched slaughter three birds operates her stall with her elderly mother. She laughed when asked (through an interpreter, of course) whether her own kids would carry on the family business.
“Oh, no,” she said. “They don’t want to. And I don’t want them to.”
Other floors of the market were no more exotic or chaotic than Philly’s Reading Terminal. The tangy aroma of cilantro hit me as I walked by tables piled high with veggies and fruits. To my surprise, the fish vendors’ floor had NO detectable smell.
Why do infectious disease experts get so freaked out about live animal markets? Because that’s one place where flu viruses can jump from a duck to a chicken to, yikes, a human, maybe with a pig in-between. Actually, viruses don’t “jump” from one species to another; they shuffle their genetic material in ways that make them mightier than the immune system. But I’m way too sleepy to get into that right now.
We journalists got up punishingly early today, Wed., and flew here to Hanoi. Saiful Islam (master’s in public health; reporter with the English service of Bangladesh’s national news agency) almost missed the bus to the airport. He has a little problem with punctuality.
“That was close. That was really close,” chided Susan Kreifels, our East-West Center program coordinator, raconteur extraordinaire and mother hen.
Here in Hanoi, we’ll see a wet market later this week. The Vietnamese version will not be so neat and nice, says native Son Phan, a reporter at the Saigon Marketing Weekly.