"In fighting 'Atypical' (i.e., Atypical pneumonia, or SARS) , don't waste any time, Unity is Strength; prevent an epidemic situation"

One of the banners that have gone up on campus this morning.

Not much new here, so I'll catch up on a couple of online pieces of news.

• From http://www.crienglish.com/144/2003-4-25/42@11195.htm a report that SARS cases will now be entered into a medical database. So what I saw on TV with paper tabulation may have been right. Strange. Educational technology on this campus compares favorably to the University of Illinois, where I work in the U.S. -- there are quite a few classrooms with computer projectors where I can show Powerpoint presentations from my laptop. And yet they're just starting to organizing this disease information into a database.
• From http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32244 (I don't know anything about this source). I've never been to Guangdong, but I remember years ago when Americans were first starting to travel to China hearing a report about agriculture in Southern China, extolling the cycle described here, from pgs to fowl to plants. It avoids the huge waste disposal problems that feedlots in the U.S. and the Netherlands have, but it may also account for the tendency of new diseases to emerge there. People in Beijing attribute the origin of SARS in Guangdong to the famous tendency of people there to eat anything, Vaguely connected to this, I've really enjoyed vegetarian cooking in China this time, with a wealth of different kinds of tofu and vegetables that I don't find in the midwestern U.S. Maybe that's the ultimate answer to these kinds of cross-species diseases.
• The article above throws in a gratuitous (to my mind) swipe at communism as the source of these practices, and I've seen it labelled elsewhere as a consequence of the collectivization of agriculture. I'm extremely skeptical of that, because I know many of these practices far predate communism, and they all may. I can see a couple of ways that the political system in China can be affecting the spread of SARS, some positive and other negative.
• By isolating China from much of the world for the period from about 1966-1980 (and to a lesser extent for about 10 years on each side of that), these events may have been postponed until the present time, when we have a chance to figure out what's going on and perhaps rapidly develop a vaccine if not a cure.
• By stifling economic growth during the same period, and then quickly opening the door to development, there's an explosive situation in which poor, uneducated people from the countryside are in constant motion in search of jobs, spreading diseases as they go.
• By having a near-monopoly on some kinds of information, China was able to suppress the news about SARS from its origins in November until now. It's a virus, and there are no treatments for viruses, so it's hard to know how much difference this would have made. But clearly there are health careworkers in China and the rest of the world who would have known to protect themselves if the news was spread earlier. The tendency to keep information under control is universal (I saw something on the net when I was looking around about EMS workers in Hawaii being told not to say anything on their radios about suspected SARS cases), particularly in cases where there's little to be done. But systems like the one in the U.S. were set up to encourage rivalries, and that can help ensure that news gets out.
• By having a near-monopoly on political power, the government can move quickly to take drastic actions (more like Singapore than Hong Kong). Whether those actions are too late, and whether they will really help, remains to be seen. At the same time, the control of the central government over local areas is problematic in China, and their ability to ensure that local governments really do what they say is always problematic. There's an old saying, "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away" that continues to apply.