Bird flu fighting cooperation between Thailand and Laos

Bird flu is proving hard to stamp out on a permanent basis. Until recently, we thought Thailand had succeeded in getting rid of it. And Laos has not reported any avian flu infections in chickens in about two years.

Now, it is cropping up in both countries -- which share a long border separated by the Mekong River, as well as a common ancestry. They're closely related linquistically (if you know Thai or Lao, it's easy to pick up the other one) and culturally.

Historically, they've been separate since France colonized Laos late in the 19th century and made the Kingdom part of French Indochina along with Cambodia and Vietnam.

After World War II, it was caught up in the Cold War just like Cambodia and Vietnam, with a strong Communist movement called the Pathet Lao supported by the nearby Viet Minh and later North Vietnam.

And like Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos was conquered by the communists in April 1975. Fortunately, as tools of the Vietnamese, the Pathet Lao were more moderate than the Khmer Rouge. Even so, an estimated 800,000 people fled Laos from 1975 to the early 80s, including my ex-wife.

The country is now still officially communist, but in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union has become more moderate. My ex-wife tells me that her mother is now allowed to have servants and to rent out her property. Plus, they welcome visits by refugees bringing capitalist dollars and francs.

And now thanks to their proximity to either Thailand and Vietnam, they're threatened by avian influenza just as those countries are, though they're far poorer than Indonesia.

So it's good that Laos and Thailand are cooperating in fighting bird flu. The poor chicken farmers of both countries need all the help they can get, and the rest of us don't want the virus to mutate into something more contagious.

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