Shoppers wearing surgical masks to protect themselves against SARS walk through a shopping mall in Hong Kong (AP)
Laurie Garrett on SARS Story aired: Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Residents of a town on the outskirts of Beijing, China rioted yesterday, ransacking a building they feared was to become a SARS treatment center, in an extreme example of the panic gripping parts of China in response to the SARS crisis.
The World Health Organization now says that SARS is under control in Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Toronto, but the number of cases in China continues to rise rapidly. Some observers believe the official Chinese estimate of almost 3,000 SARS cases is still vastly below the true number.
Laurie Garrett is a science writer for Newsday. In her best-selling books "The Coming Plague" and "Betrayal of Trust," she has written extensively about emerging infections and the global response to them. She recently traveled to the Southern China province of Guangdong, where the SARS epidemic is believed to have started, and she joins Here and Now from Beijing.
