Unmasking A Crisis

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The information blackout has resulted in unnecessary deaths as local doctors have resorted to trial-and-error treatments rather than using therapies that have proved relatively effective in other hospitals. The blackout has also put doctors in some peril. At Beijing's You'an Hospital, for instance, nurse Zhang estimates that about half of those in the isolation ward are medical staff from other area hospitals. To complicate matters further, the only people who are officially allowed to diagnose SARS in China are researchers for each city's Center for Disease Control (CDC), not the physicians who are treating the patients. "I had a patient whose symptoms clearly seemed to be those of a SARS-positive patient," says a doctor who consults at a hospital in a leafy district of Shanghai. "But after I contacted the CDC, the patient was suddenly transferred without my knowledge, and I never found out whether he had the disease or not. We doctors are all left with a lot of questions. I think it's shameful not to let us know what's going on."

Doctors worry that ignorance about the disease could allow the virus to spread even further. Misinformation abounds: a Shenzhen health official, Zhang Shunxiang, warned last week that people shouldn't wear masks because they impede proper breathing contrary to advice given practically everywhere else in the world. State newspapers suggested that a protein-rich potion containing cicada shells and silkworms could be a SARS panacea. Even more worrisome is the possibility that the disease is making its way into China's estimated 100 million-strong migrant-worker community, which has little access to health care. Already, doctors suspect that the first case of SARS in Beijing came from a migrant who worked in Guangdong province. If the virus is indeed infecting members of China's vast floating population, experts fear it could spread quickly into the country's undeveloped interior. With much of China still in the dark about the killer bug, the worst may be yet to come.