Chinese doctor gagged for revealing SARS cover-up

BEIJING, May 22 (Reuters) - China has gagged the military doctor whose revelation of the government's SARS cover-up led to dismissal of the health minister and open reporting of the spread of the deadly virus, his daughter said on Thursday.

Jiang Yanyong, 71, former chief surgeon at a military hospital in Beijing and a 50-year Communist Party veteran, had been told by the government not to give interviews to foreign media, Jiang Rui said.

"He is still free to move around, but has no freedom of speech," the 42-year-old software programmer told Reuters.

"In China, people who tell the truth have to pay a price," the daughter said by telephone from San Francisco.

Asked on Thursday if he could be interviewed by telephone, the doctor said: "I'm sorry. I cannot."

The gag order followed interviews with two top state media organisations. The semi-official China News Service last week credited Jiang for exposing the cover-up, but quoted him as saying he "did not come under any pressure or restrictions and life was as usual".

The official Xinhua news agency published a picture of Jiang's chauffeured car provided by the hospital on its Web site www.xinhuanet.com on Wednesday, saying it was treatment accorded only to "experts".

But the daughter dismissed the reports, saying her father did not receive special treatment and had had the car for five years.

"My dad is very angry. He never said those things. They're just using him," she said.

Still, coverage of a whistleblower is remarkable in China. In one of the few reports on Jiang, the magazine Caijing, known for pushing the limits of government controls, labelled him "the honest doctor".

He now needs the approval of the People's Liberation Army, and not just the hospital, to speak to reporters. A hospital spokesman said any interview request had to be approved by higher-ups and none would be entertained for now.

"He doesn't care if he is expelled from the Communist Party," the daughter said, but she did not say what might happen if Jiang defied the gag order.

Jiang Yanyong was born in Shanghai on October 4, 1931, the son of a banker. He studied pre-med at the now-defunct Yenching University, which was merged with Peking University after the Communist revolution in 1949.

He began working at the military hospital in 1957, but was branded a "counter-revolutionary" in 1968 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He was banished to feed horses at a military-run ranch in the northwestern province of Qinghai.

In 1999, the 10th anniversary of the army crackdown on student-led democracy demonstrations, Jiang accused authorities of lying when they claimed not a single protester was killed on Tiananmen Square.

"He hated bitterly the putting down of June 4," the daughter said, referring to the date the demonstrations were crushed.

Here - here's something substantial as opposed to the usual pablum from the news medidiots on SARS -

- from: http://www.nature.com/nsu/030505/030505-4.html

SARS hits hard
- but control measures seem to be working.
Death rates higher than expected, but control measures seem to be working.
8 May 2003
TOM CLARKE
inset: Sars is less likely to cause as many 
       deaths worldwide as flu.
       © WHO/P.Virot
Nearly half of the elderly people admitted to hospital with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) die from the disease, according to the most thorough analysis of the outbreak so far1.
This sounds bad, but it is comparable to death rates from influenza. Among those under 60 years of age, the mortality rate is far higher than for flu: some 13% of those with SARS die from it.
"It's a relatively high fatality rate," says one of the study's authors, epidemiologist Azra Ghani of Imperial College, London. But this doesn't mean that SARS is more dangerous than flu, she says: "It's much less transmissible than flu and is therefore much less likely to cause as many deaths worldwide."
The study, based on data from Hong Kong hospitals, also provides estimates of the incubation period and severity of SARS.
It takes an average of 6.4 days for a person infected with SARS to show symptoms, the researchers found. Three to five days passed between the onset of symptoms and admission to hospital. This period shortened as awareness of the disease spread.
These figures are in line with previous estimates made by public-health workers and the World Health Organization (WHO). They also suggest that the strategies so far used to contain SARS have been the right ones.
"Based on these data, the control efforts are exactly what they should be," says epidemiologist Ira Longini of Emory University in Atlanta.
The strategy has been to detect SARS cases as early as possible and isolate them from the population. Reducing the time between detection and isolation is currently the best way to curb the epidemic.
Unanswered questions
Crucial questions about SARS remain, some of which could change the study's conclusions.
"The big question is what proportion of infected people get only a mild infection and don't go to hospital," says Longini. If the number is high, SARS is less deadly than the new results suggest. It also means that the true number of SARS cases - and therefore how difficult it will be to contain the epidemic - remains unknown.
The only way to find out is to develop a rapid test for the virus and to screen those in epidemic areas. "I'd put extreme emphasis on that activity," says Longini. The WHO and its partners are working towards a SARS test.
Another key question is for how long virus carriers can infect others for before they develop SARS. "At the moment we don't know about virus shedding in mild or sub-clinical cases," says virologist Albert Osterhaus at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Osterhaus is working on this question using a SARS-like virus in animals.
Important new insights into the disease's spread may come from studies of a high-rise housing block in Hong Kong that was quarantined during the epidemic. But these data will not emerge for several months, says Longini.
References
Donnelly, C. A. et al. Epidemiological determinants of spread of causal agent of severs acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong. The Lancet, published online, http:// image.thelancet.com/extras/03art4453web.pdf (2003).

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