| |
East Asia summit needed to cope with
SARS
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG
KONG - There is no doubt now that virus outbreaks are a
global concern. The speed with which severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS) spread from China to four
other continents speaks as much about the modern world
as about the infectious nature of this illness.
Nevertheless, the response to SARS has revealed
a very peculiar condition in East Asia. Many
governments, fearing lost revenue and consumer
confidence, have resorted to blocking or censoring the
release of key information. This practice must stop.
Indeed, despite the apparent futility of
covering up key information of SARS, since the chain of
transmission would invariably lead to the source anyway,
governments throughout the region have resorted to
insular habits. For the lack of a better word, SARS, an
atypical pneumonia, is fought in a typically parochial
manner: information blockade.
In China, top
officials have affirmed that only information approved
by the Health Ministry can be released. Hospitals are
not in the position to provide any tally of SARS cases
or fatalities. The task of finding out the magnitude of
the problem in China has, by default, fallen into the
laps of foreign journalists. Stern, a prominent German
magazine, for instance, reported that there had been 14
fatalities in Guangdong in contrast to the reported four
cases published by the Chinese government. Other foreign
journalists have speculated that the number could be as
high as the 30s.
In Malaysia, Health Minister
Chua Jui Ming has affirmed that Malaysia would release
"current" rather than "cumulative" statistics. In other
words, if the epidemic were to spread, only the latest
numbers would be released, not the cases that had
occurred before to reflect the true gravity. This is a
practice that deviates from international protocol. The
goal is to stem any unnecessary panic. The attempt to
"adjust" the figures is consonant with press censorship
to protect the image of Malaysia (see SARS:
Nobody's buying Malaysia's silence).
In
Vietnam, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has assured the
world that the situation is under control. The World
Health Organization (WHO) has lauded the response of
Vietnam in battling SARS. But even Hanoi is evasive when
it comes to public information.
According to
information released by the ministry on April 2, "All
infected cases share the same infection source from the
Vietnam-France Hospital where the first foreign patient,
who had just entered Vietnam, was treated - there is no
infected case caused by other epidemiological
relations." Yet by this Tuesday there had been new cases
that had occurred away from the cluster, bringing the
total to 62.
The only country in East Asia that
has tackled SARS in earnest is Singapore. The number of
new infections in the city-state has been dropping as a
result. The Singapore government also announced it will
begin reopening the country's schools in the coming week
after shutting them last month because of SARS, which
had killed eight people of an infected 113 as of
Tuesday, according to WHO.
But the response of
Singapore also reflects its authoritarian impulse. When
the schools reopen, parents will have to sign
declarations saying their children are healthy. Students
who have traveled outside Singapore will have their
temperatures taken by school staff for 10 days after
their return. More important, the government is also on
the verge of compelling people under quarantine to
appear in front of web-cameras at designated hours. This
is to ensure that they have not left quarantine.
To be sure, given the urgency of SARS, it is
imperative that governments in the region converge
quickly on the same protocol or code of conduct in
handling SARS. Very simply, the world is watching. And
East Asia, which needs foreign direct investment, cannot
be shunned. The severity of SARS is obvious. Although
the global outbreak has only lasted around a month, the
political and economic impacts of SARS have been
immense.
Indeed, once people begin to go about
their business in surgical masks, as is the case at
present in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the level of fear
increases proportionately. Consumer confidence is
affected, leading to a dip in spending. Measures to stop
SARS, in other words, cannot be merely cosmetic. They
have to be both curative and preemptory, without which
the outbreak will continue indefinitely.
Be that
as it may, organization theorists have noted that
governments are poor self-evaluators. Indeed, while most
states cooperate with the international system to accept
common codes of conduct, their cooperation is often slow
and sometimes minimal. This is because states widely
fail to evaluate their own policies until the most
critical stage.
Stephen Van Evera at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: "Governments
can learn, but only poorly and unreliably, and they
often forget at an even faster rate." Bureaucrats are
often unwilling to evaluate their policies lest they be
criticized as inept. In East Asia, this is akin to a
loss of face. Hence, the authorities often resort to
various tactics to deter or retard any attempts at
evaluating their actions.
In the cases of China
and Malaysia, not only have the authorities tried to
regulate the flow of information from the top down, so
that only official reports are accepted, they are also
hampering efforts at containing SARS by releasing data
to congenial analysts only.
The inability of
some governments in the region to respond forcefully to
SARS is also due to their lack of awareness of public
epidemics. After all, the last influenza epidemic that
killed more than 8 million people worldwide occurred
nearly a century ago, in 1917. The collective memory of
the deadly epidemic has long since faded from the
collective consciousness.
Government failure on
the SARS issue also arises from wishful thinking that
SARS will go away with time. It will not. Coronaviruses
that are now identified to be part of SARS have an
extraordinary ability to capture stray bits of genetic
material from related viruses. They can then weave them
into their own genomes, or DNA. This is a feat
biologists call "recombination", or what is popularly
known as mutation.
Gene swapping is not
necessarily the threat. But if SARS becomes a virulent
strain, then an epidemic can only be contained
effectively through a combination of preventive measures
that are coordinated both across and within borders.
Prerequisite to prevention is the need for
transparency, honesty and more information from
governments throughout the region. Any attempt to
circumvent the need for information can only create a
short circuit in the regional system that will result in
ruptured diplomatic relations, such as when citizens
from one country are barred from entering another.
It is essential that the governments of East
Asia convene an emergency session on SARS soon, without
which many more lives will be unnecessarily lost, and
decades-old political capital squandered.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
