49 –4– Live Poultry Markets and Avian Flu in Hong Kong Frédéric Keck In 1997, eighteen people in Hong Kong were infected with a new flu virus, called H5N1, and six of them died. All of them had been in contact with live poultry. The H5N1 virus was soon found in farms and markets all around the territory. This was the first time that a new variety of the flu virus had jumped directly from birds to humans, without first passing through the “mixing vessel” of pigs, and this virus caused huge respiratory distress in the organisms—human and otherwise—that were not immune to this new mutation. In a massive demonstration of public health power, one-and-a-half million chickens in the territory were culled, live ducks were banned from chicken farms (because they were “sane carriers,” not sick themselves but carriers that could spread the virus from waterfowl to poultry), and all other live poultry (chickens, geese, and quail) were kept under intense surveillance (Greger 2006). China, of which the territory of Hong Kong is a “special administrative region,” raises 70 percent of the world’s poultry, and has long been considered the epicenter of the most virulent of twentieth century flu pandemics (Shortridge and Stuart-Harris 1982). Between 1968 and 2008, the number of poultry raised in China increased from thirteen million to thirteen billion (Greger 2006), while the country passed from scarcity to abundance, and from food security to food safety concerns (Farquhar 2006). It is no wonder then that China’s live poultry are under scrutiny, as the animal reservoir of the next pandemic. What does it mean to raise, cook with, and consume live poultry in a context of this intense animal surveillance? My work aims at describing how “biosecurity measures” introduced by global experts for the last fifteen years have transformed the daily life of local people (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2004). I don’t take these biosecurity measures as a form of “biopower” imposed from above, but as a way of revealing the work of humans interacting with animals. I am interested 3085-137-004.indd 49 6/18/2011 7:36:33 PM