Why meat in China - and the US - has a drug problem

Back in 2005, when I was a reporter based out of TIME’s Hong Kong office, I spent more time than I care to remember in the backyard chicken farms of Asia. This was the time of the H5N1 avian flu, which broke out regularly in chickens and occasionally (with fatal effects) in human beings and which always seemed to be one click of the genetic lock away from threatening the entire world.

To prevent that mutation from happening — one of that would have allowed the deadly H5N1 virus to spread easily from person to person, like a human flu virus — health officials in affected countries would do their best to track and eradicate outbreaks as they occurred in animals, often by simply culling an afflicted flock.