Chinese Hesitancy on Avian Flu

According to this article, China is falling short in its role in the global fight against the spread of avian influenza. The author acknowledges the massive resource requirements as well as the challenge in collating accurate information about the virus in “one of the most likely breeding-grounds for a pandemic virus”, but goes on to state that China’s current surveillance strategy needs to be revamped.

The author states that traditionally China’s crisis response has been to first identify the problem, and then to deal with it, and only once the situation begins to improve to report it to the international community. This proved to be the case with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) where the lesson learnt was that this response was not enough. With the rapidly moving bird flu, China needs to speed up the process of making samples and data readily available. China needs a surveillance system that will bring forward and share accurate information on a local and international scale.

The article concludes that so far, “China's response to bird flu has been a mixture of secrecy and parsimony that does little to serve the interests of its farmers or its people, and is not becoming of an emerging world power.”