BOOK REVIEW In the season of SARS China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfeld
Reviewed by Todd Crowell
HUA HIN, Thailand - In early 2003, when I was living in Hong Kong, I got an
e-mail from a friend and former colleague regretting that he had to cancel a
planned trip to Hong Kong. "It's that pneumonia thing," he said.
Pneumonia thing? What pneumonia thing? I wondered. What is he talking about?
I was vaguely aware that some hospital in Kowloon had reported a few cases of
what the newspapers were calling "atypical pneumonia", but why this should be a
reason to cancel a trip or
why it should even have impinged on the consciousness of somebody living
halfway around the world was a puzzle.
Not long afterward I flew to Japan and was away from Hong Kong for about three
weeks. When I returned to the SAR (special administrative region), I found a
city that had been utterly transformed by SARS.
For
by that time the "pneumonia thing" had acquired a name: severe acute
respiratory syndrome.
A fellow traveler in the season of SARS was Karl Taro Greenfeld, then the
editor of Time Asia in Hong Kong. He has written a compelling narrative about
the SARS outbreak, China Syndrome: The 21st Century's First Great Epidemic.
Greenfeld begins his story considerably earlier than the time I first became
aware of it by exploring the fetid menagerie of caged animals, snakes, badgers,
civet cats and other exotic ingredients of the "Wild Flavor" restaurants and
slums of southern China, that great incubator of diseases.
People had begun showing up in Guangzhou hospitals with similar symptoms: high
fever, coughing, clouded X-rays. They did not seem to respond to antibiotics,
the usual way to treat respiratory ailments.
"As anecdotal reports of unexplained respiratory ailments filtered back across
the border [with Hong Kong], influenza experts perked up and local virologists
began to suspect that an influenza outbreak might be afoot," he writes (p 43).
SARS found its way into Hong Kong by way of a Chinese doctor who, though
feeling poorly, nevertheless traveled to the territory and checked into the
Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, spreading his infection to the other guests.
In a similar fashion, the disease spread to Vietnam, Canada and other parts of
China. But health officials really understood they were under siege when SARS
spread through Amoy Gardens. It is hard to overestimate the fear that this
caused. Amoy Gardens is a typical lower-middle class highrise apartment complex
in Kowloon.
There are a thousand like it throughout Hong Kong. If SARS could race through
this building infecting hundreds and killing dozens in a matter of days, no
place in Hong Kong was safe. Why this dreaded scenario was not repeated in
other complexes is one of the mysteries of SARS.
But, of course, it was in mainland China that SARS had its greatest impact.
Chinese officials deliberately stonewalled, obfuscated and lied. Reports of the
disease that might have helped slow the spread to other cities were quashed,
Reporters were told what not to report.
China's authorities were loath to admit that an outbreak of unknown severity
was racing through the country at a delicate time when the country was
undergoing a leadership change. Greenfeld quotes one doctor as saying, "What
mattered more? The Party Congress or a few doctors?"
Then surprisingly, the Chinese leadership did a complete about-turn. Rather
than play down the disease, they publicly acknowledged it and took measures to
halt its spread.
President Hu Jintao decided that the issue gave him "the populist sheen that
could lubricate his ascension to real power", Greenfeld writes. He visited
hospitals and labs. He flew to "ground zero", Guangzhou, to conduct a personal
inspection.
"Hu had made a brilliant political calculation; he would personally take over
the anti-SARS campaign, making it a centerpiece of his inchoate administration
and using it as a wedge to consolidate power" (p 341-342).
It was as if a dam had burst. The number of acknowledged cases in Beijing
quadrupled overnight. The news media covered the story 24/7. Special awards
were made to health-care workers - "Heroes of SARS". A Beijinger could have his
temperature taken a dozen times a day.
Like all good medical narratives, China Syndrome is something of a
detective story. Greenfeld gives plenty of space to the virologists who decoded
the virus that caused SARS, not to mention his own Time correspondents who
"bombed" Beijing hospitals - that is, walked through the front door and asked
nurses point-blank whether they had any SARS cases.
Yet for all of its virtues, China Syndrome already has a kind of dated
quality to it. After all, SARS burned itself out in a few months - nobody
really knows why. Was it all that temperature-taking in Beijing, the culling of
tens of thousands of civet cats in Shenzhen, a change in climate, luck?
On the scale of the world's deadliest plagues, the 21st century's "first great
epidemic" didn't quite live up to its billing. Fewer than 10,000 people were
infected; fewer than 1,000 died of the disease. Not exactly the Black Death.
SARS never impinged strongly on the English-speaking world. Only a handful of
cases were reported in North America. Most of the world's attention was
diverted by the invasion of Iraq, which took place almost simultaneously.
Hong Kong may have been the world's only media market where another story
actually competed for attention with Iraq. But then we had our own nightly body
count on the local news.
Moreover, the hope and expectation that SARS and Hu Jintao's response would
usher in a new era of openness in China proved to be fleeting, a promise
unfulfilled, as China's authorities have since moved to assert their authority
over the media.
Even today we learn that a Chinese doctor, Gao Yaojie, acclaimed for helping to
fight the spread of AIDS, and coming into conflict with the authorities for
doing it, is under house arrest and denied permission to travel to the US to
accept an award for her work.
Yet those of us who lived through the season of SARS will never forget it. If
nothing else, it demonstrated how fast a strange new disease could take hold
and spread far and wide in this globalized age of air travel. The century's
first great epidemic was a bullet dodged. But it will not be the last.
China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic
by Karl Taro Greenfeld. Penguin Books (2006). Paperback; ISBN 9780141027531.
Price US$19, 464 pages.
Todd Crowell is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
For
by that time the "pneumonia thing" had acquired a name: severe acute
respiratory syndrome.
