China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfield (Harper Perennial)

A rapid soar in vinegar sales was the first warning. In Southern China, boiling vinegar is an air purification method that’s used to combat respiratory illness. Soon the Heyuan Daily reported that antibiotics and herbal medicines were also being purchased in unprecedented amounts, but the paper assured its readers there was no fear of an epidemic. Then all news of any illness disappeared.

But when a Hong Kong  hospital head prepared to attend a conference in the southern city of Guangzhou, a Chinese physician said, “Don’t come. Something bad is going on here.” A month earlier, at an influenza conference in Beijing attended by World Health Organization officials, clinicians from the province of Guangdong in southern China had reported an influenza outbreak that had “people dying like flies.” 

These bits of information were all that surfaced and only virologists paid attention. When birds were found dead in a Hong Kong wetlands refuge, virologists from the University of Hong Kong grew alarmed. In 1997, the avian flu, H5N1, had jumped species from birds to humans. It had been contained but its threat was still a vivid memory.  Bird feces were tested for this virus. It wasn’t there.

In the border city of Shenzhen, a worker in a “Wild Flavor” restaurant, where wild animals were killed to order and cooked on the spot, had come down with a severe respiratory illness that swiftly spread to hospital staff. However, China has “thousands of unexplained respiratory cases a year” and Guangdong, where the bulk of these cases appeared, is the same size as Germany. A couple of hundred cases across the province excited little attention. It wasn’t until an infected doctor unwittingly spread the illness on a trip to Hong Kong that attention became focused upon it. Tourists who had stayed in his hotel carried it across the Pacific when they flew back to the United States. 

Now there was a potential global epidemic brewing, “a biological Armageddon.” The virus was soon in six different countries.  It was isolated and identified as a coronavirus, never before found in humans, and was given a name, SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Karl Taro Greenfield was the editor of Time Asia, based in Hong Kong when SARS struck. In China Syndrome he gives a horrifying account of how an epidemic spreads, from descriptions of victims who didn’t have enough energy to blink or to power their facial muscles, whose countenances were completely blank, to Beijing’s suppression of information as its citizens died, in order to safeguard the economic boost that comes with the Spring Festival. Greenfield explains the popularity of  “Wild Flavor” restaurants whose dishes of exotic animals from around the world are believed to confer good luck and prosperity--as well as enhanced social status-- upon the diner, and tells how the wild animal markets were closed after they were proved to be a source of the coronavirus, only to reopen months later. And he poses the question: Why do viruses that are programmed to kill jump species and focus their efforts upon humans? 

China Syndrome should have been a wake-up call. Covid-19 is, according to WHO, “genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.” But, as humanity did with the Influenza of 2018, SARS was dismissed from public attention as soon as it disappeared. China Syndrome should be required reading around the world, especially for global leaders.~Janet Brown