| 摘要: | Your News story "Taiwan left isolated in fight against SARS" (Nature 422, 652; 200310.1038/422652a) highlights a problem scientists here have faced for years. I was invited to a workshop on mathematical ecology in Trieste in 1988, arriving only to find myself excluded from the list of participants and not allowed to give a talk.
Upon inquiry, I was told by the local organizer that "officially" I was not present at the workshop, co-sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency and UNESCO, owing to a protest by the Chinese Embassy in Rome after I had been invited. Apparently, unlike scientists from anywhere else, all Chinese scientists had to be recommended by the Chinese government to attend that workshop, and since Taiwan was considered to be part of China, I could not attend without permission from the Chinese government.
The SARS epidemic illustrates that being politically correct in scientific matters does more than just inconvenience a few Taiwanese scientists. Indeed, with the official global death toll from SARS at 643 by 19 May and rising fast, one can only speculate how many lives could have been saved had the health officials in Hong Kong been a little less worried about being politically correct in dealing with the emergence of this epidemic.
It is incredible that, even now, with the SARS death toll in Hong Kong having reached 247 by 18 May, officials there still refuse to link the problem with Hong Kong's proximity to Guangdong Province in China, where similar symptoms have been appearing since November. Almost all early infections in Hong Kong can be traced to recent travellers from China or people in close contact with them.
The World Health Organization sent two epidemiologists to Taiwan to assess the situation on 3 May. Meanwhile, left to fight SARS alone, Taiwan had a sevenfold rise in the number of cases in April and by 19 May had had 344 probable cases and 40 deaths.
Unfortunately, the Hong Kong government seems more preoccupied with how it looks to China and the rest of the world than with saving lives. |
