Spread of SARS inside China is called 'grave'
Thomas Crampton/IHT International Herald Tribune
Monday, April 14, 2003
iht.com
HONG KONG China's government acknowledged
Monday that infections and deaths from SARS have
spread to far-flung provinces, raising the risk of outbreaks
in ill-equipped rural regions and highlighting the difficulty of
bringing the disease under control.
In a sign that China may now alert the general public and
reverse the government's much criticized secretive
handling of the outbreak, the Chinese prime minister, Wen
Jiabao, described the situation with the disease as
"grave" in reports from a national conference widely
circulated on Monday.
China on Monday officially reported four more fatalities
caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome and 74 new
cases of the disease, bringing the country's total death toll
to 64 and infections to 1,418 as of Sunday.
As of Monday, 144 fatalities and more than 3,300 cases
had been reported around the world.
While front-line doctors in China have criticized the
government statistics, saying that they vastly understate
the extent of the outbreak, the announcement Monday did
confirm that the outbreak extended beyond the country's
main urban areas.
Of the deaths, three were in northern Shanxi Province and
one in Inner Mongolia, showing how widely the disease
has spread through China's increasingly mobile
population.
Also Monday, a report intended to highlight the successful
recovery of a patient suggested that the disease had
arrived in Beijing one month earlier than officially
acknowledged.
The disease, which has an incubation period of up to 14
days, has spread around the world by infected travelers.
The World Health Organization recently highlighted the
risk of SARS outbreaks in the more remote areas of
China. Rural Chinese health care systems have
rudimentary systems for warning of disease outbreaks,
and rural hospitals are ill-equipped to deal with infectious
diseases.
The most virulent outbreaks of the disease around the
world have usually been traced back to a single infected
person who spread the disease before health care
workers made a correct diagnosis.
A World Health Organization team that studied the
province where the outbreak began, Guangdong, found
"an urgent need to improve surveillance in the countryside
to head off new outbreaks in rural areas."
"The team observed that many of China's poorer
provinces may not have adequate resources, facilities,
and equipment to cope with outbreaks of SARS, and
underscored that Guangdong's capacity was exceptional
among China's provinces," the report said.
One of China's wealthiest and most developed provinces,
Guangdong has long experience in dealing with infectious
disease and has one of the most developed health care
systems in the country.
A report in the China Daily on Monday suggested that the
disease had arrived in Beijing nearly a month before the
date that the government had acknowledged was the
official first case, March 26.
"The first SARS patient treated in a hospital in Beijing on
March 1 has recovered," the Beijing mayor, Meng
Xuenong, was quoted as saying. "The woman and some
of her family members have recovered and will soon leave
the hospital, but her parents died of SARS due to their
advanced age."
Hong Kong, which has accounted for half the world's new
infections per day recently, announced seven deaths on
Monday, the highest toll in a single day since the outbreak
began.
Officials expressed alarm at the number of younger
patients dying despite the use of a powerful combination
of steroids and ribavirin, an anti-viral drug, to combat the
disease.
The territory's rate of infection remained steady at about
40 new cases a day, bringing the total number of
infections to 1,190.
Vietnam, one of the first countries struck by the disease
and one of the few to successfully stop its spread,
announced one new infection on Monday. SARS has
killed five people and infected 63 in Vietnam, but all cases
can be traced back to a single person who contracted the
disease in Vietnam.
Malaysia, meanwhile, identified two more "probable"
cases bringing the total there to four.
Commenting on the disease at a national conference on
SARS, sponsored by the State Council, Wen, the Chinese
prime minister, said combating SARS was a top priority.
"Much progress has been made in combating the disease
so far, with the epidemic brought under control in some
areas, but the overall situation remains grave," " he said,
according to the official Xinhua press agency.
Wen's warning came as Guangdong Province, which has
reported the highest concentration of the disease in
China, prepared to be host to the country's biggest trade
fair.
The Chinese Export Commodities Fair, also known as the
Canton Fair, takes place twice per year. It yielded
contracts worth $35.32 billion in 2002, more than 10
percent of the country's total exports for the year.
While the event last year attracted more than 120,000
customers from abroad, a World Health Organization
warning against travel to Hong Kong and southern China
is expected to reduce attendance.
The Asian travel industry has been badly hurt by SARS.
On Monday, the Indonesian president, Megawati
Sukarnoputri, urged foreign governments to avoid issuing
unnecessary travel warnings. She referred specifically to
warnings of the risk of terrorism.
"Such an overreaction has no benefits for the economy,"
she said. "We must learn that overprotective policies and
the tendency to show fear do not reduce terror threats but
only have an negative impact on economic life."
Speaking at the same tourism conference, the chairman
of the National Heritage Board of Singapore said that
SARS presented a greater threat to tourism than the Iraq
war or terrorism.
"The tourist industry in Asia is facing a greater threat
today than terrorism and the war in Iraq. It is the threat of
SARS," said the chairman, Tommy Koh.
In a further tightening of travel restrictions on citizens of the
countries most affected by the disease, Saudi Arabia has
barred entry to citizens of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Singapore and Vietnam. |
