ANALYSIS: Bureaucrats who fear losing jobs, and farmers, their livelihood, are likely to conceal or deny an outbreak, In the coastal city of Ningbo, jittery residents have been queuing up for tables at a hot-pot restaurant that promised a special dish to prevent bird flu. The restaurant’s popularity soared — until its secret recipe was exposed as a fraud.
The story of the hot-pot hoax, which made headlines in the Chinese media this week, is another sign of the widespread gullibility and ignorance about avian flu in the country where the deadly strain first emerged.
Beijing is desperately trying to educate its local officials and health officers about the realities of the disease, but the first instinct of many Chinese bureaucrats is to conceal and cover up. The greatest danger is that those same bureaucrats might even conceal a case of human-to-human transmission, the potential trigger of a global bird-flu epidemic that could kill millions of people.
See also: Wen Jiabao: We Certainly Will Be Victorious Over Bird Flu from Press Interpreter.
