New Scientist:Chinese secrecy blamed for super-pneumonia spread. The World Health Organization has continued to pressure China for more detailed information about its cases of SARS. “The team was fairly optimistic, but it is still too early to say if the big issues like a request for daily epidemiological reports will be accepted,” a WHO official told the AFP news agency on Friday.
If anything teaches the need for more transparency in public health, this is it. The spread of this disease was largely preventable, but China’s secretive dictatorship stopped only the information, not the virus.
Let’s hope that China — and other nations that tend to behave this way — will learn from this. I fear they won’t.