Bird-flu squabbling tests Romania's pluck
The Seattle Times
Jim Compton
June 1, 2006


A fast-food stand on our corner advertises "Killer Chicken" — unfortunate wording by a would-be Colonel Sanders. It's a macabre reminder of how the alarming explosion of bird flu here — extensive but with no human victims — could damage the hopes of this former communist nation to gain full membership in Europe.

President Traian Basescu says the slow and confused reaction of the government "has made the country look ridiculous."

If the mood in Bucharest is short of hysteria, it is not by much. Television images show health workers in moonsuits stuffing shrieking roosters into garbage bags en route to the incinerator. Last week, authorities swooped down on a seven-street area here in the capital city, searched 80 houses, finding many people were raising chickens at home. The birds were confiscated and destroyed, but within days more H5-infected chickens were found in the same quarter of the city.

It was a reminder to us that wild and domestic fowl are everywhere around us. An actress friend doesn't let her 6-year-old daughter play with a classmate whose parents raise chickens. We shudder at the pigeons cooing in our apartment airshaft.

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