Content area
Full Text
Karl Taro Greenfeld, China Syndrome, The True Story of the 21st Century First Great Epidemic, New York, Harper Collins, 2006.
Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague. The Story of SARS, with a new Preface on Avian Flu, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2007 (first edition 2004).
The SARS crisis in 2003 very quickly gave rise to a number of analyses on its conse- quences in terms of public health by setting China and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in opposition to each other in a global and quite general way.((1) Few accounts, however, take into consideration the plu- rality of the actors who were involved in this crisis, the brevity of which (a few months between December 2002 and April 2003) disguises somewhat the intensity of the efforts to bring it to an end. Two accounts published by journalists, one by Thomas Abra- ham, assistant professor at the Jour- nalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong, the other by Karl Taro Greenfeld, former director of Time Asia, retrace the evo- lution of the epidemic from a chrono- logical and geographic perspective. The account by Thomas Abraham is more academic and retrospective, evaluating the succession of events from the point of view of the epidemi- ological results that were finally es- tablished. That of Karl Taro Greenfeld, though written at a later stage, pres- ents the events "in the heat of the moment" and uses all the resources of journalistic suspense, re-creating the sense of uncertainty and urgency of the scientific data pro- duced on the infectious agent. Both show that the fight against SARS not only brought China and the WHO into conflict, but also linked actors in di- verse locations: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Bei- jing on the one hand, and Hanoi, Geneva, and At- lanta on the other.
Greenfeld's book is a good introduction to the events that constituted the SARS crisis, as its novelistic style is lively and enjoyable to read. To claim that it is the "true story," as the subtitle makes out, is an exaggeration, however, for de- spite the efforts of the author to acquire and con- vey the foundations of virology, it is not lacking in scientific errors.((2) The book starts with a list...