Bird-flu squabbling tests Romania's pluck

BUCHAREST, Romania — 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.

There is lots of information, most of it contradictory. One national paper went to the rural sites and found many discrepancies from government reports. And the "blame game" — George Bush's memorable term after Hurricane Katrina — is being played with gusto in Romanian politics.

Balkan themes of suspicion and sabotage reappear. Bird flu? The Hungarians did it, claimed one official report. Romanian intelligence claimed to have found evidence it was a shipment of turkey chicks from Balbolna Maszaros, Hungary, to an industrial poultry farm here that brought the dreaded virus to this country.

Romania's agriculture minister declassified the "secret report" under media pressure. It claimed thousands of young turkeys originating in Hungary — or perhaps Slovakia — had died and been quietly buried or incinerated. Hungary, for its part, says it has no bird flu and didn't export any turkey chicks anyway.

Just as quickly, the agriculture minister's boss, Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu, said there was no proof that imported birds were to blame. But then he got a broadside from President Basescu charging that the current ruling coalition had failed to protect the country, personally calling the agriculture minister "aimless" and "lacking a plan." He said ministries were "flinging responsibility from one to another."

An opposition party leader warned of catastrophic consequences for the national economy if the scare didn't end. Some of the national media foresee a 50-percent drop in tourism this summer. Europeans traditionally arrive in droves at Black Sea resorts; Germans and Danes may stay home rather than risk infection.

The Romanian agriculture minister made a point of eating a drumstick on national TV, but that did not much allay the jumpy public. Store sales of chicken are down 80 percent. Last October, the same minister was blaming the infection of three ducks in aDanube village on migrating wildfowl from Russia.

The most intriguing issue, from our vantage point in downtown Bucharest, is that the centers of infection don't seem to be on any particular migratory bird paths. The more likely villain is the container trade aboard trucks that lumber across Europe with goods from Denmark to Turkey, Spain to Poland.

One Romanian poultry farm clearly infected others in this country. American authorities have always warned that the virus was just one plane flight away if humans became carriers. Apparently, domestic birds without borders — sometimes shipped live — could transmit the flu just as efficiently.

It's just the bad news Romania didn't need at a crucial moment in its drive to join the European Union as a bona fide player among Europe's family of grown-up economies. Literally billions of dollars are on the table if Romania gains membership as planned in March 2007.

In the past, sanitation and health issues have been secondary to European concerns about corruption and legal stability in Romania. English bankers and French investors want assurances that their money will be safe in this notoriously corrupt nation, and Romanians have been under tough scrutiny. An EU spokesman declined to say if flu could delay Romania's entry, but conceded the Europeans are "very worried."

Whatever the origin of the virus, it's scary as hell. There are now 115 confirmed or suspected sites in Romania, and 1.1 million fowl have been destroyed and buried. Nevertheless, there has been no evidence that the "grippe," as they call it, has infected a single human.

Will we do better once poultry are infected in Washington state? It has been sobering to see this unprepared nation scramble and how political squabbling may trump public health.

For now, the jolly cafes aroundPiaza Amzei, Bucharest's Greenwich Village, are still jammed on Friday and Saturday. A bistro near us had a handwritten menu outside featuring two different chicken dishes. Not me. An excellent meal of stuffed cabbage, polenta and beer can be had for about seven bucks.

But another fact keeps me wary: My maternal grandfather, John Forbes Huffman, died in the Southern Saskatchewan village of Eastend during the flu pandemic of 1918. He was a lanky, vigorous 38-year-old farmer and church elder, who left a widow and four young children. That kind of sadness we don't need in Washington.

Jim Compton, a former broadcaster and Seattle city councilman, is in Bucharest interviewing Romanian intellectuals about the transition from communism.