In places like Shanghai, it gets even worse as the local Chinese Communist Party is trying desperately to hide SARS from everyone. From the Asian edition of TIME magazine:

But is Shanghai really in the clear? Doctors in this city of 16 million have begun voicing doubts about the veracity of the government figures. Local medical staff also allege that World Health Organization experts, who are concluding a monitoring trip to Shanghai, are being shown what one doctor at the No. 6 People's Hospital describes as "a sanitized version of Shanghai's SARS problem." A doctor at the Shanghai Contagious Diseases Hospital told TIME that there are more than 30 suspected cases have been admitted to their hospital's facilities, nearly double the official suspected caseload for the whole city. He and other doctors also say that Shanghai's requirements for diagnosing SARS are much more stringent than elsewhere in the world and that if the standards used in, say, Hong Kong were applied in Shanghai, many of the suspected caseload would be shifted to confirmed cases.

At the Huashan Hospital in a leafy district of Shanghai, doctors and nurses confirmed there were seven suspected cases at their hospital, although the hospital's official press liaison says they currently have none. The patients are being kept in a makeshift isolation ward housed in a dilapidated building formerly used for hepatitis patients. Doctors and nurses were not wearing full isolation suits; many were simply wearing four or five simple surgical masks over each other. But on Wednesday, security guards waiting for possible WHO visitors were ushering foreigners to a fancy high-rise building nearby. On the 15th floor of this building, medical staff in isolation suits greeted visitors, while other staff conspicuously sprayed disinfectant around the ward. There were several newly made signs in English pointing out the "respiratory clinic" and other facilities. No such sprucing-up measures, however, had been taken at the makeshift ward where patients were actually being kept

and

Also on Wednesday, top Shanghai Communist Party officials met with local official media to discuss the city's SARS situation. The meeting was classified as "neibu," or internal, meaning that the information would not be disseminated to the public. Officials told the gathered media that Shanghai would not escape the SARS epidemic, despite previous public assurances to the contrary. The party cadres also said that the WHO had told them that the U.N. agency did not believe the government figures of only two confirmed cases. Large-scale events in the city were to be cancelled, and Shanghai's much-vaunted auto exhibition was closed early after rumors that SARS-positive patients had visited the show. The media were instructed to ramp up a SARS public education campaign, so city residents would know how to prevent the spread of the virus.

But party officials then cautioned that "Shanghai's SARS caseload was still a state secret," according to one journalist who attended the meeting. The state media was not to report any SARS statistics higher than the government-sanctioned figures, nor were Shanghai journalists allowed to interview any SARS patients or their families. "Readers are going to be very confused," complained the journalist. "On the one hand, we tell them there are almost no cases in Shanghai. On the other hand, we tell them that they must be very vigilant in avoiding the disease. But if Shanghai has barely any cases, why does the public need to be worried about SARS?"

The 800 pound gorilla in the living room for SARS is the impact of new diseases on the 'immune impaired.' This is something the American medical establishment was dragged kicking and screaming to face with the possibility of mass small pox vaccinations in the world of AIDS and large numbers of heart patient and transplant survivors. An example of this happened recently in Houston Texas when one of the Army Reservists called up for the war on terrorism died from a small pox vaccination. She has an undiagnosed case of lupus.

According to some of Tom Holsinger's columns on small pox here and here and here over on Strategypage.com, at any given time, upwards of 10% of the American population can be considered medically 'immune impaired.'

The problem for the 3rd world is that childhood malnutrition and pollution both permanently damage the immune system in both far greater numbers and as a percentage of the population than 1st worlders taking organ rejection suppression medicine and heart medication. So at any given time 3rd world populations may be a third or more "immune impaired." And these people will be concentrated in cities or near modern transportation with poor or non-existent public health and medical infrastructure.

Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the spread of failed states world wide in the aftermath, Chinese diseases connected to modern transportation are going to hammer these 3rd world populations until China is quarantined.

The following is from an Indian web site, but it tracks well with the comments my earlier post on SARS attracted:

SARS is likely to have originated in China's teeming Canton (now Guangdong) province, where people live in close proximity to farm animals, and their consumption patterns (they tend to eat anything that walks, runs, swims or crawls) may have made it easier for some trans-species mutation to occur. I have observed first hand the lengths to which they go, and squeamish readers should probably skip the next two paragraphs.

In a night market in a Chinese city, I once watched with horrified fascination while a street vendor casually took a thin, harmless-looking rat snake out of a cage filled with a writhing mass of other snakes, and banged its head against a tabletop to stun it. He then attached its head to a clothesline with a large clothes peg. It hung like a thick rope, motionless, stunned.

Then the man took out a sharp knife, grasped the snake's tail, and sliced it vertically with a single, fluid motion. His assistant carefully caught the snake's blood in a glass as it writhed in its death throes, suddenly awakened. A bystander bought the glass of snake blood and drank it down neat. Another bought the snake's gall bladder or penis, I couldn't tell which. And soon enough, the rest of its body was chopped up for soup.

No wonder the Economist says, 'Southern China is a notorious crucible for infection,' noting that a major outbreak of avian influenza originated there in 1997. 'Though it is not certain where the great flu pandemic of 1918 started, many of the lesser flu epidemics that now appear every couple of years are known to originate in China. There are reasons for this: people living cheek by jowl, and in close proximity to pigs and poultry, animals from which this type of virus is thought to jump to humans.'

Totalitarian dictatorship's top priority is maintaining power, not taking care of the people. This applies to every level of the regime as power seekers lie to their bosses to make themselves look good.

There is no effective public health nor agricultural regulations to reduce disease in China because it has no power interests or party promotions attached to them and there are many cultural and monetary resistance land mines attached to disrupting established interests and hygiene habits.

This is where an institution like America's independent judiciary, which enforces product liability laws and fiduciary responsibility, comes in. All the laws and regulations that are needed to operate a modern society need an "or else" to get irresponsible actors and political interests to comply. The Chinese Communist Party has kind of, sort of, realized this, but would rather have ly advantageous corruption than an independent, rival, power center to the Communist Party.

Now it is too late. SARS is going through the Communist regime's lies like the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division went through the Iraqi Special Republican Guard.

There will be a lot of dead Chinese and a ruined Mainland Chinese economy when this is through.

China will be branded the "Typhoid Mary Nation" and strict medical security procedures will be applied to people and goods moving in and out of China, including Hong Kong, in self-defense by the rest of the world.

UPDATE: See this article in the Washington Post re: some of the political shocks SARS is creating in China.