Nguyen Si Tuan, 21, infected by eating duck’s blood, fights for his life in a Hanoi hospital.


    Animal health inspectors, the foot soldiers in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, visit a henhouse.


    Traditionally in southern Vietnam, chickens, pigs (viral mixing vessels) and people live in close quarters.


    Live poultry markets like this one in Hanoi can speed the spread of the virus from farm to farm.


    During Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, Ho Chi Minh City girls pose with a good luck rooster, ubiquitous in culture and cuisine.


    A United Nations official in Hanoi tries to convince his Vietnamese colleagues of the pandemic threat.


    In Thailand, duck herders wait for their birds to be tested for the flu virus so they can be driven field to field gleaning rice.


    Pranom Thongchan and her daughter lost two family members to bird flu in a rare case of human-to-human spread.


    In central Thailand, rooster statues are worshipped at a shrine believed to bring good luck in business and love.


    To revive his champion fighting rooster, known to carry bird flu, Ea Khamjean risks his health to clear the blood from its battered head.


    The Thai billion-dollar chicken processing industry was devastated by bird flu in 2004.


    Not expected to survive, after 82 days in the hospital, Nguyen Si Tuan beat the odds and returned to his village.


    History terrifies. John Oxford, who tracks the virus over time, visits the grave of a victim, WWI nurse Phyllis Burns.


    Oxford holds paraffin-embedded tissues taken from 1916 flu victims, hoping they hold the key to tracing its virulent path.


    Unafraid, human volunteers lined up to have H5N1 flu vaccine injected in the first human trials held in Baltimore, Maryland.


    Survivors, Dorothy Horsch, 91, and Gertrude Fitzpatrick, 98, agree, “We would never have been this close in the flu time.“