BackNews You Can Use | Asia wakes up to Ebola fight
Senior officials in China and India have been rushing to prepare their countries' medical systems to cope with possible cases
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Hong Kong: With hundreds of advanced infection-control hospital rooms left over from the fight against Sars, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, and with some medical professionals suggesting that the Ebola virus was inherently fragile and unlikely to spread in places with modern medical facilities, many doctors in Asia paid little attention to the disease until recently.
But that confidence, some say complacency, was punctured two weeks ago when two nurses in Dallas, US, and another in Madrid, Spain, fell ill while treating patients who had contracted Ebola in west Africa. Governments and doctors around Asia are now more worried that the continent’s densely populated cities and towns could be vulnerable if infected people start flying in from Africa. “What happened in the States took us by surprise," says Louis Shih, president of the Hong Kong Medical Association. “We were sort of feeling like, ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ The medical sector is now quite alarmed."
An analysis published online last week by The Lancet journal reviewed International Air Transport Association data for flights from 1 September-31 December, as well as data from 2013, out of the three countries in west Africa with the biggest outbreaks of the Ebola virus: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It found that six of the top nine estimated destinations for travellers from these countries were elsewhere in Africa. The others were in Europe: Britain, France and Belgium.
But the 10th largest destination was China. India was 13th. (Mali, a west African country that reported its first Ebola death on Friday, was 11th, and the US was 12th.)
No other Asian countries appeared in the top 20, and there have been no publicly confirmed cases of Ebola yet in Asia.
Senior officials in China and India have been rushing to prepare their countries’ medical systems to cope with possible cases. In India, top officials overseeing policy on health, civil aviation, shipping and other related issues met this month to coordinate plans. In China, the National Health and Family Planning Commission has called for medical institutions across the country to upgrade infection-control precautions by Friday.
“The first thing at the top of their minds now is Ebola," says Malik Peiris, director of the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, after meeting last week with senior Chinese doctors and officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Peiris, best known as a leader in the fight against Sars in 2003, said flight and trade patterns between Asia and West Africa meant that five cities in the region would be at the front line in preventing Ebola from spreading: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in mainland China; Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory; and Mumbai.
Mainland China and Hong Kong have one unusual advantage in dealing with Ebola: their experience with the 2003 outbreak of Sars and their subsequent experience in coping with a series of outbreaks of rare strains of human and avian influenza viruses. Hong Kong, for example, only had several dozen hospital beds at the start of Sars that were designed for patients with highly infectious diseases. That total has expanded to 1,400 beds in a construction frenzy over the past decade.
“We have the Sars experience, and I believe doctors in Hong Kong will be more aware of their protective gear than in other countries, including the United States," says Shih.
Guangzhou, the commercial hub of south-eastern China, has been a particular concern for an Ebola outbreak because it is the host of the Canton Fair, which is held twice a year and is the world’s largest trade exposition. It attracts 200,000 foreign buyers to each session, with up to one-tenth of them from Africa. At the current session of the Canton Fair, from 15 October-4 November, officials have been screening everyone arriving at the site for fevers, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
The Sars and influenza outbreaks that prompted China’s heavy investment in infection-control facilities largely bypassed India. But if the Ebola virus reaches India, it could pose an even greater challenge to manage there than it would in China, says Peiris. India is already struggling to manage an outbreak of dengue fever that is reaching epidemic proportions. The analysis of flight information in The Lancet showed that India has less than one-fifth of China’s healthcare spending per person. India also has less than a fifth as many hospital beds per 1,000 people as China.
©2014/The New York Times
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