Can a Disease Outbreak Help a Country?

May 1 -- When public health expert Harris Pastides was in Kenya in the 1980s, he couldn't believe how brazenly the government was lying about its health crisis.

At any health-care facility, he said, "you could physically point to the ones who were HIV-positive and stumbled into the hospital to die."

The hospitals were "overflowing" with AIDS patients, he said — yet the Kenyan government continued to insist that it did not have a problem.

Two decades later, the country still hasn't drawn much attention to the problem, and at least 10 percent of its population is HIV-positive, threatening an even graver crisis.

Pastides' experiences in Kenya seem familiar today, as information emerges that China had been covering up its troubles with the infectious disease SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Since the revelations, however, Beijing has dealt with the crisis far more publicly, revising its estimate of SARS patients sharply upward, and getting rid of the capital's mayor and the national health minister in perhaps the most public sackings of public officials since the Communist Party took over in 1949.

Beijing's actions have impressed a number of observers because the Chinese government is known to be one of the most secretive and insular in the world.

But public health officials like Pastides, the dean of the school of public health at the University of South Carolina, say transparency is simply in a country's best interests — as Kenya's case shows.

General transparency is something desired by the world community, and as one of the largest countries in the world — in both size and population — China's attempts at transparency are especially heralded.

There has been some speculation SARS may be the tear through which sunlight penetrates China. If so, disease might not only be a negative thing, but a positive thing, too.

Self-Interest at Heart

Throughout history, human beings have continually faced epidemics of new pathogens: the bubonic plague centuries ago, cholera one century ago, HIV this century. "SARS is only the most current example," Pastides said.