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Authors: Alan Sipress
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His parents were both doctors. His mother was Japanese, his father Japanese American. Born in Tokyo, Fukuda became a New Englander at age three when his family moved to Vermont so his father could take up a medical post there. The future flu hunter earned his own medical degree at the University of Vermont and did his residency in San Francisco before studying public health at the University of California-Berkeley. Influenza became his calling at a time when few infectious-disease specialists paid it much mind. Starting in the 1980s, HIV-AIDS exploded on the American scene and monopolized much of the scientific attention and research money. Like others in the small influenza fraternity, Fukuda
felt “his bug” was slighted. Even short of pandemic, seasonal flu was a proven scourge. “It certainly wasn’t on the radar screen,” he lamented. “People dying year in and year out in fairly large numbers in many countries and still it remains invisible.” Among flu researchers, it was a common grievance.
Yet among them, Fukuda was rare. His fervor was a quiet one. When I met him nearly a decade after the first H5N1 case, his buzz cut was graying but his round face was still youthful. He was one of the few veteran flu specialists whose brow was clear of lines and furrows. I concluded this was due not to any deficit of passion but rather a balance of passions. (Fukuda, who claims he is only a mediocre musician, had decorated an entire office wall with pictures of antique cellos.) His manner is authoritative but reserved. He is brilliant in analysis but measured and soft-spoken in delivery. He is ever polite, even when his colleagues spy irritation smoldering behind his rectangular-framed glasses. Above all, he is calm and calming. So when he worries, those around him get scared.
Fukuda arrived in Hong Kong late one sultry August evening at the head of a small CDC team. By the next morning he was already cloistered at the city health department, mapping out a systematic investigation into the outbreak.
The victim had been a three-year-old boy named Lam Hoi-ka, who had died in the spring. He had been a healthy youngster, the second son of an affluent Hong Kong couple. The father owned a company that manufactured decorative candles at a factory in mainland China. The mother was in charge of the firm’s marketing. They lived in a satellite town called Tseung Kwan O in the lower reaches of the New Territories, an expanse of former wilderness just beyond the congestion of old Kowloon that the Chinese had ceded to the British crown colony of Hong Kong a century earlier. Tseung Kwan O is really more city than town, a modern, highly planned community with scores of high-rise apartment towers, some as tall as fifty stories, amid American-style shopping malls and brightly painted schools and kindergartens. The town sits on a bay of the same name, which means General’s Bay. But the British had called it Junk Bay after the multitude of traditional sailing vessels that once plied the waters. The
community is no longer oriented to the sea but toward cavernous rail and bus depots. Each morning, the apartment towers disgorge thousands of office workers, headed for downtown less than a half-hour commute away.
Hong Kong health officers had already visited Hoi-ka’s family. It had been a hard interview. The family was distraught, and it took a long time to explain to them how an entirely new virus could have claimed their son. Investigators had gathered what information they could from the parents and their housekeeper about the boy’s recent history. None of it seemed exceptional. When Fukuda arrived in Hong Kong, he asked to see the family again, but they refused to talk anymore. He didn’t press it.
Fukuda had other angles to explore. His first priority was to determine whether this was simply much ado about nothing. The positive test result for H5N1 was so startling that he suspected it could be the result of a contaminated sample.
felt “his bug” was slighted. Even short of pandemic, seasonal flu was a proven scourge. “It certainly wasn’t on the radar screen,” he lamented. “People dying year in and year out in fairly large numbers in many countries and still it remains invisible.” Among flu researchers, it was a common grievance.
Yet among them, Fukuda was rare. His fervor was a quiet one. When I met him nearly a decade after the first H5N1 case, his buzz cut was graying but his round face was still youthful. He was one of the few veteran flu specialists whose brow was clear of lines and furrows. I concluded this was due not to any deficit of passion but rather a balance of passions. (Fukuda, who claims he is only a mediocre musician, had decorated an entire office wall with pictures of antique cellos.) His manner is authoritative but reserved. He is brilliant in analysis but measured and soft-spoken in delivery. He is ever polite, even when his colleagues spy irritation smoldering behind his rectangular-framed glasses. Above all, he is calm and calming. So when he worries, those around him get scared.
Fukuda arrived in Hong Kong late one sultry August evening at the head of a small CDC team. By the next morning he was already cloistered at the city health department, mapping out a systematic investigation into the outbreak.
The victim had been a three-year-old boy named Lam Hoi-ka, who had died in the spring. He had been a healthy youngster, the second son of an affluent Hong Kong couple. The father owned a company that manufactured decorative candles at a factory in mainland China. The mother was in charge of the firm’s marketing. They lived in a satellite town called Tseung Kwan O in the lower reaches of the New Territories, an expanse of former wilderness just beyond the congestion of old Kowloon that the Chinese had ceded to the British crown colony of Hong Kong a century earlier. Tseung Kwan O is really more city than town, a modern, highly planned community with scores of high-rise apartment towers, some as tall as fifty stories, amid American-style shopping malls and brightly painted schools and kindergartens. The town sits on a bay of the same name, which means General’s Bay. But the British had called it Junk Bay after the multitude of traditional sailing vessels that once plied the waters. The
community is no longer oriented to the sea but toward cavernous rail and bus depots. Each morning, the apartment towers disgorge thousands of office workers, headed for downtown less than a half-hour commute away.
Hong Kong health officers had already visited Hoi-ka’s family. It had been a hard interview. The family was distraught, and it took a long time to explain to them how an entirely new virus could have claimed their son. Investigators had gathered what information they could from the parents and their housekeeper about the boy’s recent history. None of it seemed exceptional. When Fukuda arrived in Hong Kong, he asked to see the family again, but they refused to talk anymore. He didn’t press it.
Fukuda had other angles to explore. His first priority was to determine whether this was simply much ado about nothing. The positive test result for H5N1 was so startling that he suspected it could be the result of a contaminated sample.
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