SARS and Avian Influenza in China and Canada: The Politics of Controlling Infectious Disease - Innovation in Global Health Governance - page 89

or city, regime transparency in tackling health crises, and regime responsiveness,
which embraces leadership decisiveness and departmental coordination.
responsiveness is an indispensable indicator of governmental capacity. It
involves the degree to which political leaders take action to cope with infectious
disease, whether departmental agencies communicate and coordinate with each
other without squabbling, whether sufficient surveillance and quarantine measures
are taken, whether public and private sectors cooperate with each other and mobilise
citizens against communicable disease, whether citizens are resilient in coping
with the health crisis, whether international collaboration is forged, whether the
epidemiological diagnosis of the virus is swift, and whether vaccines are utilised
fairly and effectively. In brief, responsiveness embraces political leadership,
interdepartmental communication and coordination, surveillance and quarantine
measures, public-private partnerships, public resilience, international cooperation,
and epidemiological treatment.
In Hong Kong, political leadership was wanting in the initial phase of the avian
influenza outbreak in December 1996 and early January 1997. As more people
succumbed to the deadly virus, the intergovernmental coordination committee
had no choice but to slaughter all the chickens—a turning point in the evolution
of political leadership. nevertheless, it took the HKSar government eight years
from the outbreak of avian influenza to decide in 2008 that all the chickens and
ducks would have to be slaughtered in a centralised house in 2010. by contrast, in
Singapore, since 1993 all poultry has been required to be processed at a slaughtering
plant approved by the agri-Food and veterinary authority (legislative council of the
HKSar 2006, 3). the different approaches adopted by Hong Kong and Singapore
fully revealed the former's indecisive indecisiveness and the latter's political will.
communication and coordination proved to be the weak dimensions of disease
control in Hong Kong, taiwan, and Mainland china. at the beginning of the 1997
avian influenza outbreak, the former chief of Hong Kong's Department of Health,
Margaret chan, announced that she ate chickens every day—a remark that provoked
severe criticisms later as more people infected with the disease passed away. 5 In
2003, communication between the HKSar government and the public was initially
plagued by a bureaucratic refusal to admit the severity of the problem. Yeoh eng-
kiong, the secretary of health, welfare, and food, maintained that the mysterious
virus did not spread to the community. Yet the deadly disease penetrated the society
rapidly and soon the critical situation discredited him. although the HKSar
government later daily reported the number of citizens infected with SARS, the entire
crisis demonstrated the problems in communication and coordination between the
Hospital authority and the public, and between the Hospital authority and private
hospitals. the privately owned baptist Hospital failed to report the conditions of
suspected SarS patients to the Hospital authority and the government. Moreover,
chan reportedly had reservations about whether the suspected SarS-infected
residents in amoy Gardens, in Kowloon, should be segregated and quarantined. 6
when the index patient carrying the SarS virus from china stayed in ward 8a of
the Prince of wales Hospital, opinions between the hospital authorities from the