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Sufferers blame hospitals

Maintenance engineers at the US health products company Amway's factory in Guangdong province receive advice about SARS. PHOTO: AFP

Patients in Beijing who have recovered from SARS are angry the government reacted too slowly to the outbreak and criticized the city's hospitals for a lack of preparedness in treating the disease.

With up to 70 percent of SARS patients in Beijing having no known previous contact with another infected person, experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) have long held that many were infected in hospitals which had inadequate infectious disease controls.

Jiang Guowei, 41, who contracted SARS in mid-April after visiting her ailing mother in a Beijing hospital, blamed the government for failing to grasp the seriousness of the epidemic after it first appeared in southern Guangdong in November.

It took until mid-April, during the peak infection period in Beijing -- the world's worst hit city by SARS -- to order stringent control efforts to stop the spread of the disease.

"Everyone knew it was very sudden, that it was a sudden disease, but the [government] directive [to fight the disease] came out too late," Jiang said.

"Ordinary people knew how serious it was, but the directive came too late, if we would have known how bad it was we wouldn't have gone to hospital and it wouldn't have been so bad," she said.

Eventually 10 people in Jiang's family came down with SARS, with her mother dying, despite being hospitalized for a heart condition.

There has been over 2,520 SARS cases in Beijing leading to 190 deaths, while nationwide 5,326 SARS cases and 346 fatalities have been recorded.

"There was no preparation in the hospital, the hospital was in a mess and the hospital administration was no good," said Yang Zainan, who got SARS after visiting her grandmother who was hospitalized for diabetes and high blood pressure in mid-April.

Eight people in Yang's family came down with SARS. Her grandmother died although her father and grandfather survived the epidemic.

"The hospital was not good at all, I think that their administration was not very strict so a lot of people got SARS this way," she said.

Yang, 21, however said she did not want to blame anyone for her family's ordeal.

"You can't blame others now," she said. "Except my grandmother, everyone recovered and are fine."

Jiang Guowei said that when she came down with a fever on April 23 she went to three Beijing hospitals and was told each time that she just had a bad case of the flu.

By April 27, as her fever rose, she was diagnosed with pneumonia, given an intravenous drip and told to come back in three days.

But by April 29, after her sister and sister-in-law also came down with fevers she was given a chest X-ray at the capital's Chaoyang hospital and pronounced as a probable SARS case with her two relatives.

Jiang said she had no idea if she had spread SARS to any of the people that she had come in contact with during her visits to hospitals.

"In the early phase of the epidemic, the scenario of a patient hospitalized for non-SARS related illnesses contracting SARS in hospital has occurred in Hong Kong, Toronto as well as here in Beijing," Daniel Feikin, a WHO consultant presently in Beijing, said.
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