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       SOMETIME in early 1999, I was fiddling with my new mobile phone, a Nokia 5110, when then Temiang assemblyman Datuk Lee Yuen Fong called me as soon as I put in the SIM card.

       I could recall his words vividly.

       “Bro, can you please help to check with the Health Department? Apparently, a few people had died of a mysterious ailment in Bukit Pelandok,” he said.

       Bukit Pelandok, located in Port Dickson district, was then the largest pig farming area in the country. Lee, better known as Tiger Lee, wanted to know whether it was true that pig farmers and their farm hands were getting sick and dying.

       I called a Negri Sembilan Health Department official who confirmed there were two deaths and that several others had fallen ill. But he did not want to be quoted as the source of the illness was not yet known.

       Later, Lee called me again, saying that he had confirmed the news with senior state officials and that I could quote him for my article.

       The Seremban bureau chief of The Star then, Hah Foong Lian, told me to alert our headquarters in Petaling Jaya about the news break.

       I sent the article using dial-up Internet. Getting a connection was a tedious process and I stayed at the office until late night. As it turned out, it was an exclusive story.

       The next day, I went to Bukit Pelandok. Journalists from two other newspapers came along.

       All three of us were oblivious to the risks at the time. We had assumed there was water contamination at the pig farming site.

       None of us wore face masks until the Health Department cordoned off the site after the number of deaths went up. (The Nipah virus, which crippled the pig-rearing industry then, killed around 105 people in Malaysia.)

       Soon, police and Rela officers guarded all entry points. Only those with face masks and media tags were allowed in.

       Photographs could only be taken from a distance as the authorities barred entry into the farms. Among sources of information were the Negri Sembilan MCA and Bukit Pelandok community leaders.

       The MCA service centre at Lukut in Port Dickson, which had Internet connectivity, became a media room. It was also the place for pig farmers and farm hands to get help.

       There, I witnessed many of the farmers and their workers weeping after losing their loved ones and also their livelihood.

       These farmers, wearing just singlets and shorts, gathered at the office to desperately appeal for financial aid for their families and farm hands.

       During my chat with the farmers at tea stalls in Bukit Pelandok, they spoke of their anxieties about the outbreak. And there were also conspiracy theories as well; there was talk that the infection was spread by those envious of Bukit Pelandok’s success story.

       Bukit Pelandok was quite a bustling place with banks and supermarkets. Sungai Pelek folks from Selangor used to traverse between their town to Bukit Pelandok on boats at a mini jetty in Kampung Bukit Pelandok just to patronise watering holes and to savour seafood dishes.

       The ferry service across Sungai Sepang cost a mere 50 sen for each trip. It would take three minutes to reach Sungai Pelek, much quicker than the almost 40-minute drive by road.

       Initially, the Nipah outbreak was assumed to have been caused by the Japanese Encephalitis virus, which use pigs as incubators and spread to humans via Culex mosquitoes.

       So the farmers and pressmen began wearing long-sleeved shirts and spraying mosquito repellent all over themselves.

       The government began a pig culling exercise and the stench of dead pigs was unbearable, forcing many villagers to move out.

       At one point, my colleague Nelson Benjamin and I were assigned to impersonate farmers to get an insight into the pig culling exercise.

       However, our first attempt was a failure as we forgot about the media sticker on my car windscreen, which was promptly noticed by Rela personnel.

       Nelson made a second attempt a few days later. He succeeded and the culling exercise made the news. (Overall, nearly one million pigs were culled.)

       After spending weeks covering the outbreak, I had to take leave for a personal milestone – my wedding on April 3, 1999.

       As I had been busy with work, my late editor Datuk Wong Sai Wan helped with the wedding preparations. So did the then Tamil Nesan journalist A. Jeyakumar and my childhood friend Yip Shao Teang.

       Both of them made the necessary arrangements such as hall decorations, driving my parents to goldsmith shops, and getting the wedding car.

       My wedding was held at the Majlis Perbandaran Seremban hall and surprisingly, some of the Bukit Pelandok farmers who I had interviewed also turned up.

       The virus was named after a village in Negri Sembilan where it was first detected. It is a zoonotic illness and infected fruit bats were the likely source. The discovery of the virus by a probe team from Universiti Malaya was acknowledged by the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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