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Source: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130313/looking-back-sars-outbreak-chinas-response
Looking back on the SARS outbreak, China's response
Peter FordThe Christian Science Monitor
March 13, 2013
Ten years ago this week, the World Health Organization issued a global health alert ? its first-ever ? about the dangers of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.
In China, where the epidemic had originated, the government was still denying that anything was wrong. Officials were not telling their citizens anything and were lying to the WHO about the death toll. Eventually, medical professionals held SARS responsible for sickening 8,422 people worldwide and killing 916 of them.
?The Chinese government?s coverup and inaction were major contributors to the spread of SARS,? says Huang Yanzhong, a public health expert with the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York.
A decade later, Chinese citizens still doubt that their authorities tell them the truth; the blogosphere is currently thick with skeptical reactions to the Shanghai government?s insistence that nearly 6,000 dead pigs in the city?s water supply do not constitute a health threat.
But experts here and abroad say that Beijing learned its lessons from the fiasco in 2003, at least as far as fulfilling its international obligations...
Looking back on the SARS outbreak, China's response
Peter FordThe Christian Science Monitor
March 13, 2013
Ten years ago this week, the World Health Organization issued a global health alert ? its first-ever ? about the dangers of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.
In China, where the epidemic had originated, the government was still denying that anything was wrong. Officials were not telling their citizens anything and were lying to the WHO about the death toll. Eventually, medical professionals held SARS responsible for sickening 8,422 people worldwide and killing 916 of them.
?The Chinese government?s coverup and inaction were major contributors to the spread of SARS,? says Huang Yanzhong, a public health expert with the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York.
A decade later, Chinese citizens still doubt that their authorities tell them the truth; the blogosphere is currently thick with skeptical reactions to the Shanghai government?s insistence that nearly 6,000 dead pigs in the city?s water supply do not constitute a health threat.
But experts here and abroad say that Beijing learned its lessons from the fiasco in 2003, at least as far as fulfilling its international obligations...