| Health officials in
Vietnam drew a deep breath of relief as Vietnam was
the first country to be rewarded for aggressive action
against the epidemic of atypical respiratory disease
that has crippled the SE Asian travel industry and
threatened to affect overall economic performance.
The way Vietnam halted SARS in its tracks has been
touted as a model for others. Vietnam suffered only
five casualties from the outbreak, although the country
was hit early, when SARS was still unknown and hard
to diagnose, let alone treat.
All of Vietnam’s SARS cases were traced to one
hospital in Hanoi, and the outbreak was successfully
contained there.
The disease never hit the South, in spite of intense
business and personal traffic between the political
capital Hanoi and the economic hotbed, Ho Chi Minh
City, the former Saigon.
Only two people from Ninh Binh, a short distance south
of Hanoi, fell ill, after the child was treated at
the Hanoi French Hospital where the father stayed
as a caretaker.
The tradition of family members to spend all day and
often night with their sick relatives to feed and
bathe their loved ones did not make the job of containment
easier, as this case vividly shows.
SARS first reached Vietnam when an American businessman
arriving from Hong Kong in late February fell ill
and checked into the Hanoi French Hospital.
Medical staff treating the patient soon fell ill,
it became clear that a mysterious, contagious disease
was plaguing the hospital.
On March 9, Vietnamese health officials met with experts
of the World Health Organization (WHO) and decided
to create a task force and fight the disease openly
– unlike China, which for a long time played
down the threat.
Vietnam isolated the affected individuals and closed
the Hanoi French Hospital off to any non-SARS patients.
Three more hospitals were evacuated and made available
as SARS-only treatment centers. Hanoi French Hospital
has since been reopened, after being disinfected and
even repainted and recarpeted.
Medical teams had to file daily updates to the highest
political levels, and the WHO stayed involved throughout
the containment process.
People who had been in contact with patients were
monitored, receiving visits from health workers on
a daily basis. Immigration authorities installed infrared
screening machines at border crossings to detect unintrusively
people with a fever crossing into Vietnam.
On April 28, the WHO declared Vietnam to be the first
country to contain and eliminate the disease. Toronto,
a hi-tech city in a first world country, would have
to wait many weeks longer to achieve the same success,
and in China, new infections are still recorded every
day, albeit at declining rates.
Stories abound about heroic nurses and selfless
doctors. But what was most crucial in the fight
against the spread of SARS was one thing that Vietnam
has not always been known for: full transparency
from the very outset.
|
