- China's worst fears about the spread of Sars pneumonia
began to come true yesterday as state media said patients from a poor region
had been turned away from hospital because they could not afford treatment.
-
- The reports raised the prospect of the disease spreading
unchecked through China's vast hinterland, with impoverished sufferers
unable to receive proper care and instead returning home to infect others.
-
- Further alarm came yesterday as the authorities announced
that the number of cases in Beijing had shot up again - this time by more
than 100, to almost 450 - following the ninefold increase in official numbers
they admitted at the weekend.
-
- The Chinese mainland's death count from the new virus
rose by 13 to 92, plus a total of 94 fatalities in Hong Kong. The number
of infections across China was said to have risen by 194, to more than
2,000. Worldwide, 4,000 cases and 217 deaths have been reported.
-
- Despite government orders that hospitals must not turn
away suspected cases "for any reason", a report carried by the
official Xinhua news agency suggested that this had been happening as recently
as last week.
-
- A hospital in Inner Mongolia - a northern region combining
poor rural areas and redundant industry - left seven relatives of a woman
who had died from Sars untreated for six hours in an open emergency ward
because they could not pay a 2,000-yuan (£155) deposit each.
-
- Universal health care is one of the many branches of
the formerly socialist state apparatus that have been stripped away under
25 years of market-oriented economic reforms. Although hospitals are state-controlled,
patients without their own or workplace health insurance have to pay cash.
-
- The hospital in the regional capital, Hohhot, told a
reporter from Xinhua that the seven patients could not be treated because
of "the formalities" - meaning money. Later, a staff member told
The Telegraph that the family had previously had an argument with the hospital.
-
- Twelve of its staff had been infected by the dead woman,
he said, and up to 40 cases were now being treated - a statistic that is
more than the official figure for all of Inner Mongolia. The hospital was
not a specialist epidemic unit and was having difficulty coping, he added.
-
- Last week, the World Health Organisation cited long-term
underfunding of public health, including disease surveillance systems,
as one of the major defects exposed by the Sars crisis in China.
-
- Henk Bekedam, the WHO representative in China, said he
was worried about the prospects for containing the disease if it reached
poor provinces from relatively wealthier areas, such as Beijing and Guangdong,
which are worst affected.
-
- Areas added to the affected list in China yesterday included
the northern "rust-belt" provinces of Jilin and Liaoning, and
the poor western province of Gansu, which is the home of footballer Paul
Gascoigne's latest club, Gansu Heavenly Horses.
-
- At the weekend, Chinese officials admitted that virtually
every aspect of Beijing's disease control and surveillance system had broken
down. The health minister, Zhang Wenkang, and Beijing's mayor, Meng Xuenong,
were both sacked over the fiasco.
- <http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/new
- s/2003/04/22/wsars22.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/04/22/ixworld.html>
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