Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7342055 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-06
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

Gripping and Insightful
There are a growing number of books coming out on the threat that viruses pose to the human population. China Syndrome is one of the latest, and it stands favorably with the best in the genre. It tells the story of the virus itself, the people who were struck down by it, and the people whose task was to track the virus down and stop it before it burned through a big part of human civilization.

Reading China Syndrome was like having a front row seat in watching how a deadly virus can claw a devastating toehold into our lives, leaving us defenseless as there is often nothing we can do about it. You learn about what makes a virus so deadly. But what is even more interesting in this account is the story of how big of a role government can play in either stopping the virus or allowing the virus to continue its destructive path.

In this case, the government was China's. It's amazing to learn of the officials incompetence, self-centeredness, and willful negligence to the Chinese and world populations at large, all to protect their own image. The arrogant incompetence of a few could have easily led to a great human catastrophe. If you are interested in the topic of threatening pandemics, then you surely should put China Syndrome on your must read list.

Richly Matter-of-Fact in Its Presentation, Profoundly Scary in Its Implications
I admit approaching Karl Greenfeld's CHINA SYNDROME with a certain degree of skepticism, not about the course of SARS or the research to discover its cause and source, but about the atmosphere created in China by the first great epidemic of the 21st Century. Writing from his Time Magazine base in Hong Kong, I wondered whether Mr. Greenfeld could really capture the various levels of uncertainty, disbelief, helplessness, fatalism, paranoia, and outright fear I experienced living and teaching in Suzhou (about 50 miles west of Shanghai) throughout the winter of 2002 and the spring and early summer of 2003.

Having now finished CHINA SYNDROME, I give the author a perfect 10 for his presentation of the scientific research associated with the hunt for the nature of SARS and its causative virus, a 9 for his detailed rendition of the SARS story at its epicenter in Guangdong Province and nearby Hong Kong, and an 8 for his discussion of SARS in Beijing and Shanxi Province. In each of these areas, Mr. Greenfeld does an outstanding job tracing the arc of the disease from Fang Lin, a meat cutter in one of Shenzhen's exotic animal markets and one of the disease's first suspected cases, to the final suspected case a year later, a thirty-two year old television reporter in Guangdong, with 884 dead and nearly 8,500 infected as the epidemic ran its course. Along the way, we meet a wide-ranging cast of characters, including China's most famous physician, Zhong Nanshan, WHO researcher Dr. Carlo Urbani in Vietnam, the family of Anna Kong in Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens residential complex, one of the outbreak's most virulent sites, Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who blew the whistle on Beijing's false reporting of SARS in the nation's capital, and Hong Kong microbiologists Malik Peiris and Guan Yi, who isolated the SARS coronavirus and identified its host source.

Mr. Greenfeld presents the story of SARS as a series of short vignettes, each centered around one of the players in the SARS story: victim, carrier, doctor, nurse, politician, epidemiologist, microbiologist, WHO member, or his own family. These short, newspaper length snapshots create a sense of immediacy and intimacy; following one on another, they trace out very effectively the multiple simultaneous threads of the SARS story line. The author has clearly done an immense amount of research and interviewing, delivering each person's slice of the story with telling personal details that make these individuals come alive. Rather than being an academic historical accounting of a nearly tragic pandemic, CHINA SYNDROME reads as a story of medical fear and confusion, of scientific drive and frustration, of political calculation and obfuscation, and of selfless (and sometimes tragic) heroism in the face of an unknown danger. And there most certainly were heroes in the SARS battle. Guan Yi literally risked his life to smuggle infection samples out of mainland China; Dr. Jiang Yanyong risked his career to expose Beijing's lies about the seriousness of SARS within the mainland and has since suffered house arrest; Carlo Urbani sent early samples of the infection to the WHO before he, too, died of SARS, effectively giving the entire planet a head start on isolating the virus. The actions of these three men alone certainly saved the lives of countless thousands and helped gain understanding of the disease and how to combat it.

Mr. Greenfeld's story makes all too clear just how fragile and precarious is the line separating civilized society from debilitating viral pandemic. Those front lines are manned by a small cadre of dedicated epidemiologists, microbiologists, and health professionals, including those at the U.N. World Health Organization. It is only by their collective knowledge and vigilance that future pandemics will be minimized or prevented. One cannot read CHINA SYNDROME without experiencing a sense of dread over how close we came in 2003, how lucky we were, and how likely it is that another, perhaps even more virulent virus, can attack us at any time. Equally scary is the realization that China's government appears not to have learned its lesson from the SARS experience, that a handful of self-serving technocrats were, and still are, willing to put the entire planet at risk for the sake of their own political self-preservation.

As for the author's ability to convey the degree to which SARS shut down life in China, I give him only a 4. The dread atmosphere created by SARS receives rather short shrift in the book. Even in cities like Suzhou, where no cases of SARS were reported, life and commerce came to a near halt. Every stranger was suspect, every cough was an alarm, every public surface a risk of infection. I hope I never again experience something that so closely duplicated the atmosphere of Camus's THE PLAGUE, and I was not even living in a city where SARS was present. The fear of its arrival was enough by itself, and Mr. Greenfeld falls a bit short in conveying just how powerful this fear was. I was also mildly disappointed to not see tables or charts showing the number of infections and deaths by country and by province within China at different time intervals; these would have added greatly to the story by illustrating more precisely how, and how widely, the disease actually spread.

On balance, however, I credit Mr. Greenfeld with a meticulously researched, highly readable, and well-told story that will make you realize how much of a bullet we dodged and how easy it would be for the next epidemic to be far worse. I highly recommend CHINA SYNDROME to anyone interested in epidemiology and the prospects for a future global pandemic.

Very accessible and periodically terrifying
A periodically terrifying, very accessible story of the rise of SARS, its probable origins in the wildlife markets of Southern China, its march through Asia and then around the world, and the Chinese government's attempts to censor and hide the true severity of the disease. I have both personal and professional interests in the ecological impacts of the wildlife trade, and it was edifying to hear Greenfeld's account of how the rise of China's economy in the 1990s led to an "era of wild flavor," in which exotic animals from around the world were thrown together in horrifying wildlife markets, slaughterhouses, and "wild flavor" restaurants. This proves to be an unbeatable environment in which viruses can mutate from one animal host to another, through the relentless pace of viral evolution, and eventually make the zoönautic leap to infect humans.

Greenfeld, who was a journalist and editor for TIME Asia in Hong Kong at the time, makes heroes out of the epidemiologists and virologists who raced to understand the SARS virus and the brave doctors and nurses who treated patients, risking their own lives, while the Chinese government mercilessly censored the story. He intersperses his own story, as he and his family and the journalists he worked with were fearful of their own safety while trying to understand and cover the story. As Greenfeld observes, SARS has by no means been beaten -- it's not clear why the disease roared through China and Southeast Asia in 2003-2004 and has receded since then, since it's still basically uncurable by the medical technologies there. So there is abundant reason to fear another outbreak.

There are some periodic laugh-out-loud moments in the story, surprisingly. For various reasons of political correctness and increased delicacy in the international medical community, for example, it's no longer considered kosher to name a disease after its place of origin. Thus, we'll have no more new diseases like "Spanish flu" or "Ebola virus." But through sheer carelessness or inattention to detail, the coalition of scientists and medical people who named the disease Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome inadvertently gave it the common nickname SARS - as if they were naming it after the Special Administrative Region (SAR) that the Chinese government now calls Hong Kong and the New Territories, where the disease was first detected. Huh.