Trade with developing countries in an age of mass air travel means that people in developed countries are going to be exposed to new diseases much faster than ever before. SARS made that clear, even though it turned out to be a deadly disease that wasn’t very deadly at all.
Thanks to SARS, health problems in East Asia are in the international spotlight. Governments must learn to be open about diseases. Standards of disease monitoring and control must be improved. But this is going to take some time; China for example, never had to deal with a threat like SARS before, and there were no mechanisms in place to deal with it, just a bunch of bad old habits.
Not everyone is with the program yet. A source who works as an editor at Chinese city newspaper writes:
“Apparently there was a story carried yesterday in some newspapers about an unspecified number of black swans that died recently in a safari park in Shenzhen. We got it too late from Xinhua last night to publish anything today. We’re running some version of it Thursday. Anyway, the one fact that would make the story is the number of dead swans – 51 over a couple days – but none of the other stories, including ours, is being allowed to state the number of dead birds. One paper reportedly said “one swan.”
Of course “tests” say that the swans didn’t have bird flu. But the park is closed down. Employees supposedly all got shots.
Who knows? Maybe the swans did die due to recent cold weather or something. But 51 in a couple days is a lot.”