China Mum On SARS Virus

by Antoaneta Bezlova

Preoccupied with maintaining social stability and fearing any bad news that may tarnish China's international image, Beijing authorities have not been talking about the outbreak that is causing fear across East Asia and other parts of the world.

According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, 806 of 1,622 cases of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) worldwide as of March 31 have been reported in China, where at least 34 people have died.

Yet a series of interviews by IPS in the city found that the majority of Beijing's residents are either ignorant of it or have scant information about the illness raging inside China -- even if Beijing is a hotspot for the illness and is one of six countries were local chains of transmission have been identified, along with Hong Kong.

At the Yansha flower market, where on the weekend hundreds of people were busy buying flowers for the annual festival of sweeping the graves, salesgirls and customers were surprised to hear about the disease.

"Dangerous pneumonia in Beijing? I haven't heard of it and the papers haven't reported it," a salesgirl who gave her name as Liu said confidently.

"I think this pneumonia is spread only in Hong Kong but I'm not surprised because they often have dangerous epidemics. Remember the chicken flu?" asked another businesswoman surnamed Zhang.

Over the years, Beijing residents have become used to a string of nasty flu epidemics, with ever new mutations that have rendered new vaccines useless and have learnt to meet them stoically by using piles of Chinese herbs and remedies.

While people wearing gauze masks have appeared in some of the narrow and densely populated city lanes as well as on public buses, many have been quick to dismiss the seriousness of the disease.

"It is probably just another bad 'liugan' [Chinese term for a flu]," said one traditional Chinese medicine doctor. "The panic is because they haven't treated it timely and properly with Chinese herbal remedies."

"Because of the weather change, many upper-respiratory infections appear in the spring," asserted Dr. Li Liming, head of the national Center for Disease Control and Prevention. "We don't foresee any nationwide epidemics in near future but few localized and small epidemics are quite possible."

People's tempered stoicism in fending off annual flu epidemics, coupled with the government's deliberate news blackout, have transformed the capital into a surreal city where problems do not exist as long as they are not mentioned.

Hong Kong -- a Chinese territory that Beijing was so proud to take back from its British colonial rulers in 1997 -- has suddenly become a blank spot on the map of Chinese media.

Few here are aware that in the last couple of days Hong Kong, which has seen 530 cases of SARS and 13 deaths, had imposed stringent public health measures.

All schools on the territory of Hong Kong have been closed, those who have had intimate contact with victims have been quarantined and new cases are to be sent to a designated hospital.

But nothing of these desperate attempts to combat the spread of the disease has been reported in Beijing.

Chinese officials and the tightly controlled state media fell virtually silent after saying in early February that atypical pneumonia had killed five people and infected 305 in the southern province of Guangdong.

But last week, China drastically raised its death toll from the new disease, saying that 31 people had died in Guangdong and that there were three deaths in Beijing.

Despite the government-imposed news blackout, rumors about the spread of the deadly strain of pneumonia have slowly begun to filter out. Two international sports events based in Beijing have been cancelled because of SARS fears.

The World Economic Forum has delayed its annual China Business Summit set for Beijing this month until September or October.

Rock music lovers in the city have been also asking why the first-ever concert in China of the British veteran rockers Rolling Stones has been suddenly called off.

Last week, the popular tabloid 'Beijing Star Daily' quoted experts as saying they had no scientific proof that Chinese traditional medicine such as Banlangen could prevent pneumonia. The article also dismissed the use of boiling vinegar inside the house as a reliable fumigation method.

"Gauze masks out of stock in the capital city," read the headline in the 'Beijing Youth Daily' on Monday morning. Without giving any figures for the number of people infected and the background of the disease, the paper described a panicky situation in the city where people prompted by rumors have rushed to buy surgical masks and stock up Chinese herbal medicines.

Investigators from the WHO, meanwhile, were still awaiting daily updates from across China that Chinese health authorities promised them on Friday.

Members of the WHO investigative team in Beijing were also awaiting approval for a request to visit the southern province of Guangdong, where the outbreak is believed to have originated.

[Officials with the Chinese government offered an unprecedented apology April 4 for not quickly informing the public. "We apologize to everyone," Li Liming, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control told reporters. He said the Chinese government faulted its own poor coordination between the nation's medical departments and its media. Chinese officials also confirmed the first case of SARS in Shanghai, the nation's most populous city.

-- ENS