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Abstract
American beef exports may be down, but the use of [Gummer]'s publicity-grabbing stunt has sped across international borders. Thailand's prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has taken the "camera+food+politician=public reassurance" tactic to a whole new level. His version of the Gummer ploy is brutal but effective. If one politician eating dodgy foodstuff is slightly reassuring to the public, his argument goes, then watching the entire cabinet tuck into Hainanese chicken rice, roast chicken, and spicy chicken soup, despite the recent outbreak of bird influenza, must be very reassuring. In many ways the Thai politicians were even braver than Gummer was. When little Cordelia Gummer bit into that juicy burger, no human cases of BSE had been found. By contrast, when the Thai government gathered for their feast five people had died of bird influenza in Vietnam, with some experts predicting that the virus would become more deadly than SARS.