One Toronto paper suggested this T-shirt design role in this outbreak. A report by the official Chinese news agency has admitted that a hospital in Inner Mongolia left seven relatives of a woman who had died from SARS untreated in an open emergency ward for six hours because they could not pay the required cash deposit of £175 each.
ahis is only one aspect of the mounting public heath problemis
in China, where some 80-120 million surplus rural workers are adrift from permanent communities and rely on travelling for temporary work where they can find it. There is a growing intravenous drug misuse problem in the country, and HIV/AIDS is another increasing misery, particularly in the huge city of Shanghai where the sex industry has mushroomed in recent years, bringing its own public health issues.
Despite the relatively low number of probable SARS cases so far in the United States - 39, with no deaths as yet attributed to the disease - the same pressures mean that the potential for an epidemic is definitely there in the USA.
The largely private, insurance-based US health care system, in which there is only minimal monitoring of public health, and some 40 million US citizens have no insurance and so may therefore be out of the loop in terms of the sort of health surveillance necessary to tackle outbreaks like SARS), means that Americans are at greater risk.
Now more than ever we need to press the case for internationally coordinated and publicly funded health and social care systems around the world.
SARS is above all a virus linked with globalisation - freed to spread and take root by privatised medicine and an absence of public health precautions, and exposing the dangers that diseases of the poor in developing countries can impact on the lives and well-being even of the wealthy.
The nearest to a global health authority is the WHO, a largely toothless UN body which has for decades been under attack from successive US administrations angered by a succession of its campaigns which impacted on the profits of US corporations or against the bigoted values of Christiar fundamentalists - against tobacco, against artificial baby milk, for cheaper generic drugs, for contraception and safe abortion facilities in developing countries, and most recently against excessive sugar consump tion in the processed food churned out by multinationals.
As a result of US hostility, the WHO's budget has been effectively frozen since 1980. It has no capacity to deliver or organise health services at national level, restricting itself to working with member state governments: and in recent years it has effectively embraced Blairite "third way" policies, seeking 'Global Public Private Partnerships' with giant pharmaceutical companies
But while Washington and western B governments are happy to seek
profitable coexistence with secretive and repressive regimes like that in Beijing which steps up the exploitation of Chinese workers, and to promote market-style and privatised health care systems, they leave themselves and the vast majority of the world's population vulnerable to the spread of diseases, whether new, like SARS, or the age-old preventable killers like malaria.
While limitless resources were poured into the Iraq War, too little time and money has been devoted too late to combating SARS. Yet now, because SARS is perceived as a threat to the wealthy countries of the west and north, it is prioritised over genuine and long standing mass killers such as malaria, which kills 3,000 people every day, compared with a world-wide death toll of under 300 so far from SARS.
Capitalism is the underlying illness: SARS is just the latest symptom
page 23 of the scan
socka istr nce May 2003 23