Pandemic Surprise - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 31

they were initially blocked from inspecting the military hospitals where most of the victims were being
treated. Although officials continued to assert that the epidemic was contained, on 16 April WHO took the
unprecedented step of chastising the Chinese government for “inadequate reporting” of SARS cases. 119
Chinese leaders were deeply worried about the impact of the epidemic upon trade and economic
growth. SARS, says Yanzhong Huang in a fascinating account, “caused the most severe socio-political
crisis for the Chinese leadership since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.” China's still-powerful former
president, Jiang Zemin, reputedly urged strict censorship, while his successor, Hu Jintao, favored disclos-
ure and collaboration with the WHO. Old-guard Beijing officials tried to conceal the full extent of the
new epidemic not only from the outside world but even from high-ranking officials in the Zemin faction.
When the WHO, for the first time in its history, advised visitors to stay away from Hong Kong and Guang-
dong, the Health Minister responded that SARS had been contained and that south China was completely
safe for visitors. A courageous whistle-blower, a retired military surgeon named Jiang Yanyong who had
treated many victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, circulated an email that accused the minister of
bald-faced lying. * Time magazine covered the story and, according to Huang, “triggered a political earth-
quake in Beijing.” 120
President Hu Jintao and his supporters now took firm command of the situation: bureaucratic duplicity
and inaction were replaced by an almost Maoist display of party-state willpower. The equivalent of 1 bil-
lion dollars in state aid (a fraction of the economic damage already caused to China and Hong Kong)
was made available to upgrade local hospitals and public-health services. Health Minister Zhang Wen-
kang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong—both Zemin loyalists—were purged, and other officials were
bluntly told that their survival depended upon extirpating SARS. “Driven by political zeal, they sealed
off villages, apartment complexes, and university campuses, quarantined tens of thousands of people, and
set up checkpoints to take temperatures. . . . In Guangdong, 80 million people were mobilized to clean
houses and streets. In the countryside, virtually every village was on SARS alert, with roadside booths
installed to examine all those who entered or left.” To the surprise of many, these draconian quarant-
ines—“momentous measures” says Yanzhong Huang—seemed to work. The spread of the SARS epidem-
ic inside China was arrested, and in late June the WHO canceled its warnings about travel to Hong Kong
and Beijing. 121
While the drama inside China was unfolding, a WHO-organized virtual consortium of laboratories
was working night and day to discover the cause of SARS. Within a month, this unprecedented research
effort, spearheaded by Malik Peiris and his colleagues in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, had isolated a
coronavirus. Although scientists were greatly relieved that it was not “the Big One” (an influenza pan-
demic) after all, they were flabbergasted that a member of a viral family normally associated with mild
colds and diarrhea had become an international serial killer. And as researchers sequenced the genome of
the SARS virus, they found little link to any of the known human-adapted members of the family. The
SARS virus was genetically sui generis.
There was much speculation about an exotic animal source. Once again, the crack Hong Kong team
led by Guan, Peiris, and Shortridge returned to the wet markets, this time in Shenzhen, the boomtown
neighbor of Hong Kong. Among caged animals in the retail wildlife market, they soon found the SARS
virus in a group of masked palm civets and a raccoon dog; a Chinese ferret badger also showed evidence
of SARS' antibodies. 122 All three small carnivores are considered luxury or health items in the diet of
Guangdong urban dwellers. (Ironically, civets are eaten because of a homeopathic belief that they provide
immunity to influenza.) They are also lucrative commodities in the booming south China bushmeat trade
that includes imports from Laos and Vietnam. SARS, then, like HIV, was a deadly by-product of a largely
illegal international wildlife trade, intimately connected with logging and deforestation, which mortally
threatens human health as well as regional biodiversity. 123