Why must Chinese press take a detour for virus info?
By Hu Shuli (Caijing Magazine)
Updated: 2005-11-15 13:58

Bad news abounded in the latter half of October, when Inner Mongolia, Anhui and Hunan all reported avian flu outbreaks from the H5N1 virus. The highly infectious virus could be spreading at a frightening speed.

Hu Shuli, the editor in chief of Beijing-based Caijing Magazine which is famous for its upright and investigative reports. [cnfol.com]

At least the central government has shown greater transparency than in the past. Apparently drawing from the lessons of SARS two and a half years ago, government agencies have been briefing the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and World Health Organization (WHO) in a pro-active and timely manner, and have won international praise for doing so.

The press conference given by the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Agriculture on October 28 also boosted transparency, as officials answered many questions from the international and domestic press.

But despite this, the domestic press still lags noticeably behind in its coverage. News about the virus often takes a detour to reach domestic audiences: it is first covered by foreign media, and then picked up by domestic press. Journalists sent to infected areas also say that local officials have not been cooperative enough.

For example, the government briefed the OIE on October 24 about infections in Anhui and Hunan, yet the news first ran exclusively in the Farmers' Daily, on pages 2 and 4, over the next two days.

On the newspaper's Web site, the items were not even posted. Only after the Foreign Ministry spokesman and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government Web site confirmed the infections, and foreign media had widely reported on them, did the official Xinhua News Agency get the word out on a broad scale domestically.

The mysterious death of a 12-year-old girl in Xiangtan, Hunan, also appeared first in the overseas press. Official domestic media did not run the news until after Beijing notified the WHO of her death, and sent a taskforce to Hunan to investigate.

When other domestic press, including Caijing, sent journalists to Xiangtan, they met many obstacles in gaining access to the case. Apparently, local government agencies do not quite see eye to eye with Beijing on the matter of transparency.

Admittedly, the situation has improved immensely over what we witnessed in the early days of the SARS epidemic in 2003, when the question of the virus's very existence in China was deemed a state secret.

But if we want to further improve the situation, we must also acknowledge that officials still are not open and efficient enough in disclosing virus information to the public.

Millions of Chinese farmers, with their lives and property directly threatened by the virus, deserve to receive information first-hand the minute it becomes public. Better informing farmers means granting greater freedom to the domestic media. At very least, they should be allowed to stand on the same starting line as their foreign counterparts.

Officials still seem to be preoccupied with the fear that fully disclosing information may make too strong an impact on the public, and thus fuel panic. Such reasoning holds no water in this case.

With international health groups issuing one warning after another about the potential damage H5N1 could do, some panic is inevitable – especially given people's awareness of China's recent outbreaks.

There is no other choice but to face the truth squarely. Bad news always shocks. But people will get used to dealing with it as long as they are able to know the whole story and learn how to cope with the threat.

The SARS epidemic should teach the lesson that official hesitation and lack of cooperation with the media could easily lead to another credibility crisis and create much more panic and instability than there would be otherwise.

The market for avian flu vaccination in China is another excellent example. In the past decade, Chinese scientists have done a considerable amount of research on vaccination against the highly-infectious avian flu virus strains, and have made considerable headway.

But fearing the public will get the wrong idea and panic, the government has been extremely reluctant to emphasize the use of these vaccines as a precautionary measure.

As a result, demand for the vaccines in China has decreased over the years, which in turn has put a damper on vaccine research and production. Not until the last two years has this situation begun to change for the better.

Today, countries around the world have reached a consensus that avian flu poses a great threat to human health. But debate still exists as to when a disaster would hit and the potential scale of its damage.

We know fairly little about how the virus mutates, and even as large numbers of domestic and migrant birds die of the virus every day, the number of bird-to-human infections remain small.

There also have not been any reports of human-to-human transfers. This shows that the battle against avian flu is not only a pressing matter, but also one that could drag on indefinitely.

Should Nature leave us enough time to respond, we still have a chance to contain the virus and prevent a potential catastrophe. But we should never become complacent with the work we have done.

Clearly, we still have a ways to go in China to create completely transparent mechanisms for media scrutiny and the release of information to the public. But only by doing this can we build an environment conducive to enhancing public health and national health standards.

In this sense, the latest round of bad news about avian flu, as worrying as it is, may prove to be a blessing in disguise. It calls attention to our inadequacies.