One parrot, imported from South America and held in quarantine in Britain, along with a shipment of birds from Taiwan. One swan, in the Romanian village of C.A. Rosetti, near the border with Ukraine. One man, Bang-orn Benpad, 48, a sometime driver and gardener in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi, who had helped himself on a couple of occasions to chickens from a neighbor's flock. The flock had been dying off, and the chickens he took were close to death anyway. Days after he killed, plucked, grilled and ate the birds, he developed a cough and a fever and visited a local clinic, where they took an X-ray of his lungs and suggested he check himself into a hospital. Instead, he went home, but last Monday his condition worsened, and a new X-ray showed a rapid deterioration in his lungs.
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