<i>The Political Economy of the SARS Epidemic: the impact on human resources in East Asia</i> ‐ by Grace O.M. Lee and Malcolm Warner

The Political Economy of the SARS Epidemic: the impact on human resources in East Asia Lee, Grace O.M. and Warner, Malcolm Routledge , Abingdon , 2008 Pp. xxii +168 . ISBN 978 0 415 39498 7 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) remains one of the most important new diseases to emerge in recent human history, despite its low levels of recorded infectivity and mortality. As a coronavirus, a distant cousin of the common cold, SARS has no obvious cause or cure, nor is there any medical intervention that can help to mitigate the disease once it establishes itself in the host. The spread of the virus has been wonderfully documented in this lucid and balanced study, which acknowledges the lack of data about the virus which affected the first human being on 16 November 2002 in Guangdong province, southern China. Lee and Warner have divided their multi-disciplinary study into three parts. The first places the SARS contagion into a historical context, underscoring the fact that SARS has not been a big killer compared to World War Two, the Black Death, or the Spanish Flu (Figure 2.3 sets out these parameters with great clarity), without minimising the importance of surveillance and containment. The second part is a detailed analysis of the epidemic in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, while the third looks at the ‘lessons to be learnt’ from SARS. These latter two sections of the monograph lead the reader to conclude that, without the strict measures introduced as a result of international cooperation between many national governments and the World Health Organisation (WHO), SARS might have been catastrophic at a global level. By implication, if SARS or some other unknown and virulent agent were to appear, the risks of international contagion remain extreme. The key lessons to emerge from this study are: first, the necessity of national governments remaining transparent in acknowledging and monitoring disease outbreaks; and second, the need to share that information at a global level so that rapid and appropriate international responses are feasible. The containment of infected and suspected cases at the national level must be matched with the imposition of international quarantine. Above all, SARS, or any other epidemic, must avoid becoming an instrument of political ambition. The politicisation of SARS is documented in Part Two, a case study of the People's Republic of China. From mid-February to mid-March 2003, the Chinese government continued to deny that ‘atypical pneumonia’ (the name for this strange disease before it was labelled as SARS) had constituted a problem. Denial coincided with the WHO declaration that the disease had surfaced in Canada and Europe. The eventual willingness of the PRC in April 2003 to acknowledge that they had mishandled the health crisis constituted not only an important breakthrough in the containment of the epidemic, but also provided a critical lesson for the future—if the powerful Chinese government could not stop local whistleblowers, then no government in the world could. The country-case studies in Part Two provide a detailed analysis of the economic impact of SARS on East Asia. Drawing together a diverse range of information, they argue that as the region's prosperity increased, the services sector grew—especially tourism, hotels, and international and domestic travel businesses. The services sector typically requires greater domestic and international labour mobility, and it is this mobility that helped to disseminate SARS. Moreover, Lee and Warner show that the greater a country's dependency on services the greater the negative economic fallout from SARS. We can surmise that the East Asian growth trajectory will continue to depend on the expansion of the services sector, thereby exposing national economies to the economic and other vulnerabilities revealed by SARS. This is why the work of Lee and Warner is as relevant to security specialists as it is to scholars, scientists and business people. If we are to confront a similar, future contagion in a manner that is speedy, saves lives, contains domestic panic, and prevents the international economy from being destabilised, we can benefit by studying the SARS epidemic of 2002–04 and preparing appropriate responses now. One question remains: how many governments today have strategies in place to contain SARS-like infections?

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