Response to Sars too slow says expert

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

One of New Zealand's top virus experts says the country's response to the Sars virus this year was hindered by proportional representation and privatised airports and airlines.

Christchurch virologist Lance Jennings, who chaired the Government's Sars technical advisory committee, told a conference in Auckland yesterday that it should not have taken three months from the outbreak of the disease to stationing nurses at airports.

The national pandemic planning committee, which he also chaired, held its first meeting about Sars by teleconference on February 21, just 10 days after the first confirmed outbreak of Sars-related pneumonia in South China.

Sars was made a notifiable disease in New Zealand on April 1 and training for nurses to be posted to airports started on April 10.

But it was not until May 23, when the disease was already declining in China, that the nurses arrived at the airports.

"That was late. We are in an MMP [proportional representation] environment, and the Government no longer owns the airlines. That really hinders the speed of response," Dr Jennings said.

He told the Australian and New Zealand Societies of Microbiology at the Aotea Centre that his committee co-ordinated a full four-week exercise only last year on handling an epidemic originating from "Mainland Wellsun", a thinly veiled name for China.

What surprised him when the real thing occurred this year was "the realisation that our main ports of entry are all privately owned and we don't own our airlines, so it took time to get consensus and get all the ministries to agree that it was important that we did tighten our border control and that the health of the public was more important than tourism and those other economic issues".

"Those are things you have to negotiate in our environment," he said.

"Even though we have the powers under the Health Act to do things like that, we still had to negotiate."

Australian speakers at the conference also raised doubts about whether Australia and New Zealand would have been willing to take the tough action that China took if travellers had brought Sars here instead of to Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada.

Dr Dominic Dwyer of Sydney's Westmead Hospital said that once they realised the extent of the problem, Chinese authorities requisitioned a hotel, built a new 1000-bed specialist Sars hospital in a week and put 27,000 people in quarantine, with only daily phone calls and weekly visits.

"Whether the average Aussie or Kiwi would have stood for that I seriously doubt," he said.

Sixteen hospitals around Beijing were cleared for Sars patients and 30 others for suspects - a move made possible by the fact that Beijing's hospitals were normally only half-full.

"In Australia and New Zealand they are more than 90 per cent full," Dr Dwyer said.

He said the Chinese also blocked roads leading out of Beijing and took the temperatures of up to 200,000 people a day who fled the capital for Anhui Province alone.

An Australian consultant who led an international team to investigate a Sars case at a Singapore laboratory last month, Dr Tony Della-Porta, said that when he visited Hong Kong at the height of the Sars crisis he was heat-checked at the airport and had his temperature taken when he checked into his hotel.

"I think New Zealand would do it faster now than it did, probably," he said.

"They have a great deal more experience."

All the speakers said Sars, which affected 8437 people and killed 813 around the world, was far less infectious than other contagious diseases such as measles and influenza.