Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
effective response to the epidemic was initially complicated by fear, confusion,
and denial in china, as beijing engaged in a deliberate attempt to suppress knowledge
of the epidemic in both the domestic and international arenas. according to Yanzhong
Huang (2003, 65), the first SARS case was 'thought to have occurred in Foshan,
a city southwest of Guangzhou in Guangdong province, in mid November 2002'.
reports on the spreading illness by the health authority in Guangdong province
were classified as top secret by Beijing, such that the disclosure or discussion of the
outbreak was a direct violation of the State Secrets law (66). Ultimately, the epidemic
generated such levels of panic among the general chinese populace that warnings of
the growing crisis leaked out through individuals on the internet. Yet beijing persisted
in its attempts to mislead the wHo. on 27 February the chinese Ministry of Health
declared the epidemic to be officially over, while the disease was actually spreading
rapidly through the populace of beijing (Fidler 2004, 75). the chinese began to crack
on 4 april, when the head of the china center for Disease control and Prevention
(china cDc) publicly apologised to the chinese people and international community
for failing to inform the public about a highly contagious and frequently lethal new
infection (Pomfret 2003b). the full extent of beijing's duplicity became clear when
on 9 april a prominent communist Party member (and physician), Jiang Yanyong,
publicly accused the government of covering up the extent of the epidemic in beijing
(Pomfret 2003c). on 16 april the wHo took the unprecedented step of issuing a
very public rebuke of china's actions, chastising beijing for misleading the global
community regarding the true extent of SarS infection throughout that country
(Pomfret 2003a). two days later chastened national leaders announced a national
war on the virus, and ordered Communist Party officials to reveal the true extent of
the epidemic or be held accountable. on 20 april, the party leadership sacked the
minister of health, Zhang wenkang, and the mayor of beijing, Meng Xuenong, for
their complicity in the cover-up (Fidler 2004, 98). this move was seen as an attempt
to deflect blame from senior party officials for their role in the crisis, and was summed
up in the chinese idiom 'scaring the chickens to catch the monkey' (curley and
thomas 2004). vietnam's superior response to the outbreak resulted in that country
being declared SarS free on 28 april. on 5 July 2003, the wHo announced that the
SarS epidemic had been effectively contained. Despite the fact that the international
community successfully contained the spread of the virus in a relatively brief span of
time, the medical community insisted that it represented a significant global threat.
thomas tsang, the epidemiologist who oversaw the investigations in Hong Kong,
commented that there was a possibility of a global pandemic 'if the appropriate
control measures were not taken' (bradscher and altman 2003).
Costs of the Epidemic in Canada
Unfortunately, the economic effects of the SarS epidemic remain largely unknown,
particularly on the canadian economy. at the sectoral level, the SarS epidemic had
a pronounced negative impact on the canadian economy in the second and third
