Lester in car at night

Music

Starts:01:00:00:00

Lester:  Along a deserted road in central Malaysia, the stench of death hangs over two small farming villages.

00:03

Dr Too:  I think we could have prevented a lot of people from dying, if we had not ignored

00:14

Dr Too

some rather uncomfortable facts.

Night, deserted village scenes

Lester:   Most survivors of Bukit Pelandok and Sungai Nipah have fled and a quarantine has forced out the few that wanted to stay. Even the police have locked up and gone.

00:30

Eighty people from this village alone are dead. One family in every three has lost a loved one. and the $700 million industry that employed them is all but destroyed. The killer that came here had never been seen anywhere in the world. And it now appears to have come because of a disastrous violation of the balance of nature.

00:43

Map Malaysia

Music

01:06

Highway near Ipoh/scientists at piggery

Lester:  Ipoh, two hours drive north of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, an old mining town that's been hit by a rush of biological masks and airtight suits. Disease specialists here to track an illness that struck local farms seven months ago.

01:12

Swampy countryside/pigs

This was ground zero, but all they knew then was pigs had a killer illness and people were getting sick as well.

01:28

Dr Too

Dr Too:  All the victims had a history of direct physical contact with live pigs.

01:37

Lester:   Dr. Henry Too, a leading pig disease specialist, is upset and angry as he looks back on events since September 29th last year, the day the first human illness in the current outbreak was reported.

01:44

Dr Too:  At some point in time, when the clinical features do not fit, we have to consider the unknown.

01:57

Men fogging piggery

Lester:  In fact, it was very much a known illness Malaysia's health system looked to, as workers in Ipoh's pig farms started dying.

02:06

They blamed a common mosquito borne killer in Asia - Japanese Encephalitis, or JE, and responded by fogging to kill mosquitos anywhere they might infect animals or people. The diagnosis was a deadly mistake. It set Malaysia's response to a medical crisis on the wrong course for five months. While the likely cause of the epidemic was in the trees around them.

Dr Too:  The medical authorities

02:16

02:42

Dr Too

were absolutely convinced, even in the middle of March, they were absolutely convinced that the outbreak was primarily JE.

Lester:   They were convinced, but other experts like you...

02:55

Dr Too:  Were not.

02:59

Dr Lila

Dr Lila:  I realised this problem sometimes late in December.

03:01

Virology lab

Lester:  The crisis was still confined to farms around Ipoh when virologist, Dr. Azmi Mohammed Lila and other began expressing doubts about the JE diagnosis.

03:06

Japanese Encephalitis kills ten thousand people a year in Asia. Mosquitos carry it from infected animals to humans, the disease then attacking the central nervous system, particularly in children. But in this case, it was adult pig farm workers who were dying.

03:16

Dr Lila

Dr Lila:  JE of course wouldn't cause problems in adults. JE normally cause problems in kids, in young animals, or young humans. Not in adults. So in this case, basically based on this, you know that it's not really JE.

03:33

Pig coughing

Lester:  Also ringing alarm bells among some veterinary scientists, large numbers of pigs were getting sick.

03:52

Dr Too:  Now, JE is not related, associated with clinical disease in pigs.

04:02

Dr Too

Super:

Dr. HENRY TOO HING LEE

Universiti Putra, Malaysia

So that is obviously one very, very important epidemiological feature that is completely inconsistent with JE.

04:08

Siang:  It is very clear that as far back as October, November last year,

04:20

Siang

Super:

LIM KIT SIANG

Opposition Party Leader

warning had been sounded that it could have been another viral agent, another virus, killer virus.

Lester:  Yet, as opposition leader, Lim Kit Siang points out, Malaysia's government went ahead spending tens of millions of dollars vaccinating pigs and people against JE.

04:32

Fogging piggery

Fogging to kill the mosquitoes that spread JE.  And ignoring warnings like the one posted on a medical website by a Malaysian scientist in mid-January.

04:45

Website

Woman:  We must not forget to rule out other possible occupational causes.

04:57

Siang

Siang:  To admit that they have made a mistake in focussing on JE when it was another viral agent, I think politically was something that they could not do.

05:01

Music

Sick pigs

Lester:  Lulled by the belief mosquitoes were the problem, not pigs, Malaysian authorities could see little reason to stop the trade in pigs around the country.

05:19

Truck full of pigs/map

Lester:   Late in December, the killer broke out of Ipoh. At least one farmer did what is now unthinkable, he trucked highly infectious pigs three hours south from Ipoh, headlong into the very district where it could do hundreds of millions of dollars damage, near Sungai Nipah and Bukit Pelandok, South-East Asia's biggest pig farming area.

05:33

Piggery

How did the people in these pig industry villages react? As you do to a mosquito problem, with repellant, anti-mosquito fogging, and JE inoculations.

05:58

Inoculation centre/Dr Too

Dr Too:  Many of those people had a false sense of security. They were told that you cannot get this disease by touching live pigs, or handling live pigs.

06:09

Lester:  Which we now know is absolutely wrong.

06:27

Dr Too:  Yes. And I guess the farmers were given the wrong advice.

06:31

Lester:  That was fatal for many, wasn't it?

06:38

Dr Too:  Yes, it was definitely fatal for a lot of pig farm workers.

06:41

Moi

Moi:  I was really worried to death.

06:46

Lester:   Mother of six, now a widow, Yee Ah Moi, watched her husband slip into a coma and die.

06:50

She says he'd gone to work at the pig farm willingly, because he wasn't afraid of mosquitoes.

06:57

Moi:  We didn't know the pigs were poisoned. They said it was caused by mosquitoes... and we thought there was nothing to be afraid of.

07:04

Siang

Siang:  The deaths were totally unnecessary and avoidable if by last year they had heeded warnings that it could be another viral agent.

07:12

Specimen bottles

Lester: Malaysia's health minister declined our request for an interview. But some local specialists defend the Japanese Encephalitis diagnosis. They say overseas experts contacted back in December, made the same mistake.

07:21

Jamaluddin

Super:

Dr. AZIZ JAMALUDDIN

Dir. Veterinary Research Institute

Dr. Jamaluddin:  To them it didn't strike that it is a new disease, because Malaysia has been endemic for JE, so they say, oh maybe a new, mutant JE.

07:35

Police car

Lester:  The advice gave Malaysian authorities confidence in their diagnosis.

07:42

Sungai Nipah and Bukit Pelandok residents began fleeing because neighbours were dying. But officials told them to go back, guard against mosquitoes and tend their pigs.

07:50

Moi

Moi:  We didn't understand the situation at all.  Later they told us we must not raise pigs, and must move out.

08:02

Police car

Lester:   They were finally ordered out in mid-March, by then fifty-four people were dead. Malaysian authorities had discovered how wrong they'd been; overseas tests confirmed this was not JE, but something far more frightening. A virus so new it needed a name. So they christened it after one of the villages feeling its fury; they called it Nipah.

08:12

Daniels

Super:

Dr. Peter Daniels

CSIRO Animal Health Laboratory

Dr Daniels:  It's a highly infectious disease in pigs, and when the disease is on a pig farm, then our studies show that virtually the pigs on that pig farm become infected. And so pigs really are an important host of this disease.

08:35

Piggery

Music

08:50

Lester:   Nipah virus, a new entry on the sobering list of zoonoses, or animal diseases that pass to humans. AIDS and Ebola are on the list. So too is Hendra, named after the Brisbane suburb where it surfaced five years ago, killing horse trainer, Vic Rail. It is similar to Nipah virus.

08:55

Daniels

Dr Daniels:  We see this as another instance of a trend that's observed worldwide at the present time, where diseases previously unknown to medical and veterinary science are suddenly emerging.

09:17

Daniels and scientists at piggery/army shoot pigs

Lester:  As Australian, Peter Daniels and others began their hunt for the mystery species that passed Nipah to pigs, Malaysia's army moved in for the country's biggest ever animal culling. Almost one million pigs.

09:34

FX:  Gunshot

09:50

Lester:  Virtually half the industry shot and shovelled into pits on the farms where they were buried.

09:51

FX:  Gunshots

10:00

Lester:  When survivors slipped behind quarantine lines to see what Nipah had left, many found the piggeries looking more like they'd been hit by a missile than a virus.

10:03

An occasional unburied carcass, the only sign this was ever a pig farm.

10:15

Lim

Lim: It was really hard to come back and see it like this.

10:23

Jamaluddin

Dr Jamaluddin:  What we wanted to do at that time was just to stop the infection to the human as fast as possible. Whatever it takes at that time to get at the pig is being done.

10:31

Lester:  And sometimes that meant levelling the buildings?

10:41

Dr Jamaluddin:  That meant levelling.

10:43

Destroyed piggery

Lester:   But the ethnic Chinese in charge of most piggeries here read it more as a religious attack by the Muslim majority. Devout Muslims despise pigs.

10:46

Lim

Lim:  They didn't tell us. We weren't there.  We came back and found everything flattened.  They didn't notify us. We didn't expect to come back  and see it like this.

10:57

Women crying

Lester:  Shocked, grieving, angry, farmers set out to win back some of their losses.

11:18

The Mahathir government offered $20 a pig compensation. Farmers demanded $80.

11:26

They stormed the offices of a government minister, winning nothing in the short term, but demonstrating the construction of their once mighty industry had become a powerful issue among the Chinese lobby.

11:36

Chon

Super:

LAI POH CHON

Farmers' Protest Spokesman

Chon:  This could be the end of the pig industry in this country. I would say so, because look at the way they compensate and everything. You do not have enough capability to rebuild the whole thing again.

11:59

Scientists with dog

Lester:  With the pig industry collapsing around it, Malaysia's Veterinary Services Department kept its own video record of the effort to trace Nipah to its source in nature. It shows key moments as the local and visiting Australian and U. S. scientists work to understand what they're dealing with. Like finding the rogue virus not only in pigs, but in this dog.

12:11

Vet:  Peter, do you see opaqueness in they as well?

12:34

Daniels:  Hard to say. I can see what you're saying, yeah.

12:36

Laboratory

Lester:  Tests on horses and cats also came back positive for Nipah. They're still waiting for results from three hundred species, including from this goat.

12:40

Vet:  Get a close-up of this. There's something going on here. Look at this.

12:51

Lester:  The virus had shown it could easily jump from pigs to other animals. It was not what Malaysian authorities had wanted to hear, given some of the destroyed piggeries

12:56

Plane

were on the fringe of Kuala Lumpur's new international airport. It has suffered a recent plague of rats, and the scientists' own video shows rats in an infected piggery.

Daniels

Daniels:  Certain other animals have been detected with virus infection, but only in circumstances where they've been in close contact with infected pig farms.

13:24

Handlers with horses at racetrack

Lester:  With details from the disaster to the south, some mysteries back in Ipoh began unravelling.

13:38

Vets at the local turf club recalled two horses that died of an unexplained illness last October.

Dr Gobal:  There were other horses also

13:47

13:56

Gobal

Super:

Dr. RAJ GOBAL

Perak Turf Club, Ipoh

that were put down showing neurological symptoms, you know, from time to time. And we've always tested them for JE, and they're always found to be negative.

Lester:   Now they've gone back to the same stables as the two earlier cases next to a pig farm and found two more horses positive for Nipah.  So could the earlier cases have been the undiscovered virus?

14:08

Dr Gobal:  Yes, but we were not looking for the disease then.

14:22

Lester:   So we don't know?

14:26

Dr Gobal:  We don't know.

14:27

Abandoned piggery

Music

14:28

Lester:   And it's on that very pig farm, next to the quarantined horses, you get a chilling sense this might just be where Nipah made its deadly leap from unknown host to pigs. It too is quarantined, though Malaysian authorities took us for a look.

14:32

Music

Lester:  Once a giant piggery, its 30,000 pigs are now buried like those at Sungai Nipah and Bukit Pelandok. But there's a crucial difference in the stories from survivors of Leon Sim Nam farm.

14:52

They talk of sickness, not just in recent months, but two and a half years ago.

15:07

Ramasamy

Super:

Dr. MURUGAYA RAMASAMY

Leong Sin Nam Vet

Dr. Ramasamy:  It was early 1997. We found most of the workers, they fell sick unusually, you know.

15:14

At least 20 workers went down with fever and for a long time.

15:21

Lester:  In January, 1997, this man slipped into a coma for eight days.

15:28

Rajulu

Rajulu:   My mouth started frothing...then I returned home and had difficulty parking the motorbike.  I started to become unsteady.

15:34

Lester:  Adimolam Rajulu was hospitalised for almost a month. Doctors diagnosed him and four other farm workers with viral encephalitis, one died. Could it have been JE? Problem is, the vets then were struggling, just as they would two years later, to explain signs right out of character with Japanese Encephalitis.  Here too, there was a sudden jump in the death rate among the pigs.

15:48

Ramasamy

Dr Ramasamy:  In places where have about only five percent, it shot up to about ten percent, double the number of pigs that usually die. That was quite unusual.

16:14

Lester:  So was the Nipah virus here more than two years before scientists finally caught up with it in the midst of Bukit Pelandok's disaster? Yes. A blood sample saved from the time of Adimolam's illness proves it.

16:23

Dr Ramasamy:  We managed to dig out that sample of serum, and we found it was positive for Nipah virus.

16:39

Lester:   This man had Nipah?

16:45

Dr Ramasamy:  Yes, he had Nipah.  Late '96 or '97, Nipah must have been present during that time.

16:48

Lester:  Still suffering after effects from his illness, and now retrenched from a deeply troubled industry, Nipah's first known sufferer is not so sure he's lucky.

16:53

Rajulu

Rajulu:  Only God can answer that. I wouldn't know.

17:04

Lester:  So might this farm have an answer for the critical question of where the virus came from? In fact, for scientists who know of Australia's experience with Hendra virus, this landscape rings alarm bells.

17:07

Music

17:21

Farm

Lester:  A farm carved out of jungle  next to limestone mountains, habitat for bats. Fruit trees, hundreds, growing in and around the piggeries. Food for bats. A virus closer than any other to Hendra, which is known to have come from the large bats known as flying foxes.

17:24

Jamaluddin

Dr Jamaluddin:  You have the prehistoric animal and the modern animal brought together. The virus from the prehistoric animal, I would say from the flying foxes, crossed to the pig. But it's quite plausible, looking at the location and also the way the pigs were infected mostly in the areas where fruit trees are abundant.

17:44

Researchers in boat

Lester:   Five hundred kilometres away, in Malaysia's far south, researchers have been collecting flying foxes.

18:10

FX:  Gunshot

18:18

Lester:   Already five have tested positive for exposure to Nipah virus.

18:19

FX:  Gunshot

Lester:   It's not yet proof, but the research team now says bats the likely culprits for Nipah.

18:26

Daniels

Super: 

Dr. Peter Daniels

CSIRO Animal Health Laboratory

Daniels:  And if it's in a mobile, you know, free flying animal such as a fruit bat, then you might expect to find this virus throughout the range of that particular species.

18:34

Lester:  It's a sobering thought for nearby countries. Pigs can be stopped at the border, bats can't.

18:50

Jamaluddin

Dr Jamaluddin:  The possibility that this particular wildlife travel is there. So if those wildlife were infected with Nipah, they would definitely infect any of those domesticated species - swine, horses, dogs, cats - anywhere in the world, for that matter.  As long as they can reach them. The danger is there, the potential is there.

18:58

Bat specimen

Lester:   Scientists will probably never know if the virus made its ill fated hop from flying foxes to pigs on this property. But they say it doesn't matter. Nipah's lessons are already there, and they're telling for modern farming.

19:21

Daniels

Daniels:  Wherever we have increased population densities of, you know, of any animal species then we create a situation where disease can move rapidly among them.

19:38

Music

Jamaluddin

Dr Jamaluddin:  The moment we tip the balance, the environment, the ecology, will fight back to find the equilibrium.

19:50

Pigs

Music

Lester:   Running giant numbers of animals for efficiency; mixing industries for profitability; pushing closer to the habitat of wild species for productivity - in Malaysia, large scale modern farming appears to have barged in on a species it simply couldn't afford to mix with.

19:59

Music

Ends:01:20:28:00

CREDITS:

Reporter       TIM LESTER

Camera        DAVID LELAND

Editor           DAVID LELAND