This nonfiction account of tracking and treating SARS in China is a gripping read. I have read quite a few of these “new virus” books and found this to be one of the best. Not only does it provide a provocative explanation of the conditions under which a virus moves from an animal host into humans, the book also offers a fascinating picture of life in China today.
Given the large population and the impact of industrialization on Chinese culture and living conditions, it’s easy to see how a new disease could arise and get out of control very quickly. The immediate response of China’s government to the outbreak of SARS was to keep the disease secret and that led to complications that may not have occurred if the government had allowed more information sharing among the world’s epidemiologists.
But the most intriguing thing that Karl Taro Greenfeld points out in The China Syndrome is that the strategies that kept SARS from becoming a worldwide pandemic were developed in the 19th Century to control TB and other infectious diseases. In short, before antibiotics there was cleanliness. Hospitals took great care to control the spread of germs and to isolate individuals who had communicable diseases until they were either recovered or dead. Harsh perhaps, but effective. Then came antibiotics and the ability to just kill the germs instead of controlling them. Trouble is, some of those germs have developed resistance to antibiotics over the years and this may have been the case with the SARS virus.
Now that some microbes are resistant to our medicines and vaccines, we find that hospitals can actually amplify disease. Think of it—A bunch of sick people are collected in one place and that place becomes highly infectious. Who are those most likely now to become infected? Healthcare workers and the friends and relatives who come to visit sick people in the hospital. Thus, the hospital becomes a giant petri dish and the first folks to get sick are the health workers upon whom the ill depend to care for them. It’s a bad situation all around.
Using techniques such as quarantine and cleanliness, doctors in China and Hong Kong managed to get the SARS virus back in its box, but no one knows for how long. Where SARS came from and where it might be headed are questions whose answers are yet to be fully nailed down. I highly recommend Greenfeld’s book for anyone interested in this and similar topics.
Other excellent books in this subject area are Laurie Garret’s The Coming Plague and Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem.