Beijing (dpa) - An eerie silence descended on the streets of
China's capital on April 21, 2003 as many of the city's 15 million
residents shut themselves indoors to avoid a deadly new virus.
The previous day, the government admitted what a growing number of
people had suspected: Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was
spreading via human contact and had already killed dozens of people
in Beijing.
Scientists traced the origins of the SARS coronavirus to wild
animals that were often sold in markets and consumed in restaurants
in the southern province of Guangdong.
Once it passed to humans, SARS spread from China to five other
countries where local transmission was reported: Canada, Mongolia,
the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.
From November 2002 to July 2003, it infected more than 8,000
people worldwide and killed nearly 800, most of them in China,
according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A decade later, most observers agree that the harsh lessons from
SARS led to better handling of less serious human spreads of avian
influenza in China since 2003, including the current H7N9 bird flu.
The government made "massive investment in the whole surveillance
system" for infectious diseases after SARS, including modern
equipment and training of medical staff, Henk Bekedam, WHO's China
representative during the SARS outbreak, told dpa.
"Never say never [another SARS], but from what I can see, I'm
generally quite encouraged by the response to the H7N9," said
Bekedam, now director of health sector development at WHO's Western
Pacific regional office in Manila.
China has built a system capable of detecting new types of human
viral infection with symptoms similar to atypical pneumonia, he said.
"And if the surveillance system is able to pick it up, identify
the virus, is able to sequence it and then to share [the
information], that's not bad," Bekedam said.
The fright that SARS gave China and neighbouring countries helped
secure agreement on the 2005 International Health Regulation, which
gave governments an obligation to report infectious diseases and
widened the scope for WHO to send advisers.
"I think without SARS and H5N1 (bird flu), we would still be
negotiating now," Bekedam said. "That was one of the direct
benefits."
Beijing confirmed the SARS outbreak in Guangdong to WHO in
mid-March 2003, two months after the first infections were reported
to Chinese authorities.
WHO experts accepted that problems of clinical diagnosis were
partly to blame for the delay, but there were also suspicions that
local authorities hid cases.
Beijing suffered the biggest outbreak, eventually recording 2,521
probable SARS cases, including 193 deaths. It also experienced the
biggest cover-up.
In early April 2003, there was concern within WHO that few Beijing
hospitals reported SARS cases daily, while contact tracing seemed
poor, rumours of new cases were not investigated and media reports
suggested that cases in military hospitals were "not being frankly
reported."
There were "coordination challenges within the government" and
poor cooperation with WHO, Bekedam said.
One of those who did most to expose the cover-up was semi-retired
military surgeon Jiang Yanyong.
Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory diseases expert in Guangdong was also
"very vocal" on SARS, Bekedam said. "He was very strong about it,
that the details should be shared."
"So these two gentlemen, I think, were very courageous to come out
and they played an important role," he said.
Jiang, now 82, sent a letter about his concerns to two Chinese
state media but no reports followed. So he accepted interviews from
international media who heard about the letter.
Friends had told Jiang that three Beijing military hospitals had
treated nearly 150 SARS patients by early April. The health minister
reported 12 cases in the city.
"My first reaction was that he was lying," Jiang told the Beijing
News recently. "I was very angry."
Partly because of poor preparation and failure to report cases,
about 400 medical workers were infected in Beijing.
"Actually, before I was infected we didn't know too much about
SARS," said Yue Chunhe, a doctor who caught the virus in late April
at Beijing's Tongren Hospital. "We just worked in a normal way
[without special precautions]," said Yue, now 42, who worked in an
emergency department rather than a SARS isolation unit.
Wu Zhen, a trainee nurse at Beijing's People's Hospital in 2003,
said she was infected in mid-April. "People didn't know the
situation," said Wu, now 36. "That caused a delay in treatment and a
serious spread of the disease," she said.
The health minister and Beijing mayor were sacked in late April
that year, but it remains unclear exactly how the cases in Beijing
went unreported.
As fears grow about the current spread of a new bird flu strain,
many rights activists and ordinary people are still unconvinced that
the party has changed its culture of official secrecy.
The SARS cover-up took place during and after the annual National
People's Congress, the nominal state parliament, which met from March
5-18, 2003 to finalize a crucial leadership transition from Jiang
Zemin to Hu Jintao.
"It was clear that when the meeting was finished - the congress -
that the communication became a bit more easy," Bekedam said.
"And whatever the reason was, I think it was not only the military
hospitals [that failed to report cases]," he said.
Copyright 2013 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH