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Remember the children’s story in which Chicken-licken is hit on the head by a falling acorn? She turns it into a global catastrophe, racing around to warn all her friends, “The sky is falling!” (Anon. 1914). This story came to mind one morning in 2005 as I was writing about issues of risk and safety. That night I dreamed about a live-bird market: There were exquisite small parrots and large macaws and pigeons. I was with a class and I told everyone it was urgently important that they wash their hands and clean their clothes before coming home with me because of the danger of passing on the avian flu to my chickens. Avian flu as a threat passing from humans to chickens? I awoke amused at how I translated Chicken-licken’s panic into concern for my own chickens, the dream-work blithely rebutting the anxiety sweeping the nation over the possibility of a human epidemic of H5N1, the highly pathogenic avian flu. But I also woke convinced that this little children’s narrative crystallizes elements of human awareness—folk wisdom of the Richard Hoggart or Raymond Williams variety—that we have lost as our agriculture and medical science have become targets of scientific management strategies designed to maximize safety by monitoring and minimizing risk.1 As I worried about risk, safety, and the avian flu, the story of Chicken-Licken made me pause a moment to consider what constitutes risk, where risk comes from, and who is authorized to define, manage , and respond to it, as well as what constitutes safety, where we can find it, and what bargains we make in search of it. Long years since I first heard it as a child, elements in the Chicken-licken folktale still seemed remarkably familiar to me in 2005, during the heyday of the avian flu panic. Among the many barnyard species that figure in the story—chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks—it is Fox-lox who causes the real trouble. For when the birds encounter the sly fox in the wood, as they are going to the king to beseech his aid in the “catastrophe” they imagine with that falling 97 Epidemic “Fox-lox said, ‘Come along with me and I will show you the way.’ ” —Anon., “The Story of Chicken-licken” bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 5 acorn, the fox offers to act as their guide: “Fox-lox said, ‘Come along with me and I will show you the way.’ But Fox-lox took them into the fox’s hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up poor Chicken-licken, Henny-penny, Cockylocky , Ducky-lucky, Draky-laky, Goosey-loosey, Gander-lander, and Turkeylurkey , and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky had fallen!” (Anon. 1914, 15) During the winter and spring of 2005–2006, the television news playing every day at the gym replayed this old story in a new form. Announcers warned of a newly intensifying form of avian flu, known as H5N1, or high pathogen avian flu, whose vectors were waterfowl and—it was feared—farm fowl. This new flu threatened to jump from birds to human beings, creating an epidemic that would necessitate fast and widespread government intervention. Amid the alarm and fear, Fox-lox (or rather Fox TV and their ilk) portrayed itself as guide, disseminating, defining, and even purporting to manage the nature and meaning of the crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) seemed to play the role of Chicken-licken when it offered this analysis of the situation: “Avian influenza is very contagious among birds and can make some domesticated birds, including chickens, ducks, and turkeys, very sick and kill them. . . . If H5N1 virus were to gain the capacity to spread easily from person to person, an influenza pandemic . . . could begin. . . . Experts from around the world . . . are preparing for the possibility that the virus may begin to spread more easily and widely from person to person.”2 The CDC message was clear: just like Chickenlicken and her friends, American citizens faced with the risk of avian flu must look to government and the media to define the risks the nation faces and the path to safety. Those experts tell them that danger lies in wild birds and backyard chickens rather than large-scale poultry corporations. Another form of awareness is generated by the expert knowledge circulating around H5N1, where discourses of race, economics, and nationality...

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