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DaShi
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The Taste of Japan
Sep 2000
time: 05:28
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quote:
Man's Virus Infects Town, Killing His Family
By JOSEPH KAHN
LINHE, China — In the single-story isolation ward of the Ba Meng Hospital, the medical staff and fellow patients heard Dr. Li Song's plaintive cry as SARS ravaged him and his family a few weeks ago.
"If this is going to kill us," Dr. Li said, "let it take us all together."
SARS did end the lives of Dr. Li's father, mother and wife. But it ignored his plea and merely ruined his own.
Dr. Li, a 40-year-old physician, returned from Beijing in late March carrying the SARS virus to this remote town in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, his family's home. He passed it to almost all of his close relatives. Then, after he finally beat the disease, he was arrested.
The police detained Dr. Li on charges of vandalism and violating an infectious disease law. Whatever the validity of the indictment, he stands at the center of a tragedy that involves as much psychological as physical trauma.
"He worried about how he could go about life if he recovered from SARS," said Li Hong, a close friend and fellow medical worker. "Then on top of everything, they called him a criminal."
SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, originated in China in November, and it has been creating medical, political and economic repercussions ever since. Even as the number of new cases reported each day appears to be peaking, SARS is still stigmatizing its victims.
As with AIDS in its early years, the hysteria associated with SARS is as potent and destructive as the virus itself. American colleges have banned healthy people from Asia from attending graduation ceremonies for their children.
In China, cities and villages have been turning away travelers from Beijing for fear of catching a virus carried by roughly 1 in 6,000 people in the capital.
Nothing, though, can compare to the stigma attached to being one of what the World Health Organization calls superspreaders, people whose genes, hygiene or colossal misfortune cause them to pass SARS to at least 10, sometimes as many as 70 other people, often starting local epidemics. SARS, in a cruel twist, has proven less deadly for some superspreaders than for people close to them.
The strain of SARS that Dr. Li brought to Linhe was powerful enough to infect six immediate family members, at least nine medical workers and a county propaganda official who rode on a train with Dr. Li. All told, the Linhe area now has more than 100 cases of SARS, many of them traced to the city's first SARS victim, Dr. Li.
Friends and relatives say the disease alternately enraged and depressed Dr. Li during his five weeks in the hospital. He briefly fled his unheated room in this chilly northern town in early April, apparently to try to help family members then falling sick.
When his father later died in the same ward where he was being treated, becoming Linhe's first SARS fatality, Dr. Li cursed the medical staff for providing bad care. He smashed a window and overturned a desk, medical workers said. He then became inconsolable.
"I would call him and try to comfort him," said Zhang Xiaoxia, a longtime friend who stayed in touch by mobile phone. "We knew there was no way his heart could take it.
"Most of the time he could barely talk. Or he would mumble something like, `I'm talking to you, so I guess that means I'm still alive.' "
Dr. Li, currently locked in the Linhe municipal jail, could not be reached for comment, but relatives and friends described him as a devoted doctor. He worked in the emergency room of a local hospital run by the national railway system. He was the one colleagues consulted when they had medical problems of their own.
Friends nicknamed him "big forehead" for his bookish tendencies. Self-taught in English and acupuncture, he was offered a slot at an elite medical graduate program in the mid-1990's, an opportunity that could have secured him a job at a big-city hospital.
He passed up the chance because it would have meant leaving this mutton and cashmere trading town, situated on an elbow of the Yellow River. Friends said he and his wife thought their infant daughter should grow up in the company of their tight-knit family.
He did attend a training program at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine this spring. It ended in late March, just as SARS was racing through hospitals in the capital, though health authorities were denying at the time that the disease had become a serious problem.
A few days before his planned return, Dr. Li got a headache, then a fever. Whether he knew he had caught SARS, or even knew at that point what SARS was, is in dispute.
Tian Wenhua, the deputy director of the general office of the Linhe municipal government, said in a telephone interview that Dr. Li knew he had SARS and returned to Linhe anyway, needlessly endangering the city.
"He was confirmed with SARS while he was still in Beijing," Mr. Tian said. Asked how he knew that, Mr. Tian first said that Dr. Li had admitted as much. Then he backtracked and said, "It's what everyone is saying."
Li Rong, Dr. Li's younger brother, called the charge unfounded. "I was at his side constantly after he got back from Beijing," said Mr. Li, who subsequently caught SARS from his brother and is recovering in a Linhe hospital. "He did not have any idea what he had."
Shortly after Dr. Li returned from Beijing, he sought treatment at Linhe's best hospital, Ba Meng, where he was initially placed in the regular respiratory disease ward. That suggested that local doctors had not yet isolated him as a SARS patient.
Even a week after he checked into the hospital, it was unclear what his doctors knew, and what they told Dr. Li, about his ailment. What is undisputed is that on April 8 Dr. Li walked out of Ba Meng Hospital, with his wife by his side.
He told colleagues that he was frustrated with the medical care and the hospital conditions and was alarmed to hear that his father and mother had taken ill.
"He called and said he was feeling better and had to get out," said Li Hong, the friend at the railway hospital, who is not related to Dr. Li. "He felt he had to help his family somehow."
Hospital staff members urged Dr. Li not to leave, but they did not try to prevent him from walking away, said a person who had been present.
A few hours later, Shan Yuli, the deputy director of the railway hospital, acting on orders from regional authorities, went to fetch Dr. Li. Mr. Shan said that he had explained to Dr. Li that he had a virulent infectious disease — he said he had not referred to it as SARS — and that Dr. Li had to return to Ba Meng Hospital and submit to quarantine. Dr. Li followed orders, Mr. Shan said.
Not long after he returned, Dr. Li was joined in the hospital by his father and mother, then his wife, then his two brothers and their wives. A family caretaker caught SARS. So did medical workers at Ba Meng. A chain reaction was under way.
After his father died on April 12, Dr. Li exploded with rage, his friends said, smashing hospital property and, by one account, punching a doctor in the face. He was furious that no one dared to dress his father's body in traditional funeral garb for fear of catching SARS. Several days passed before the body was carted away for cremation.
His anger quickly faded to depression when, before dawn a few days later, doctors rushed into the room Dr. Li shared with his mother and wife and performed an emergency tracheotomy to restore his mother's breathing. She died a short time later. He lost his wife the next day.
Friends who spoke with him said they had done their best to keep his spirits up. His brothers appeared to be recovering, they assured him, and his daughter was eager for him to come home.
"If the thought of suicide went through his mind," Ms. Zhang said, "the responsibility he felt for his daughter kept him alive."
The situation in Linhe continued to deteriorate. Residents stopped leaving their homes except to restock food supplies. Hotels closed their doors. By early May, police officers dressed in medical suits and 12-ply masks blocked exits of the train station and barred outsiders from entering the city.
By the time Dr. Li's health improved in early May, city authorities decided to hold him accountable for malfeasance that they claim worsened the SARS epidemic. They cited the April 8 incident, and subsequent destruction of hospital property, as violations of China's infectious disease law.
Even if Dr. Li knew he had SARS before April 8, it is not clear whether leaving the hospital broke the law. SARS was officially added to the list of diseases requiring mandatory quarantines only on April 14, six days later.
Mr. Tian of the municipal government office acknowledged that the statute in question had not been updated at the time of Dr. Li's alleged infraction. He also said investigators had yet to determine whether anyone who had caught SARS from Dr. Li had done so during the brief period when he had left the hospital. But he said Dr. Li should have known better anyway.
"He is a doctor with knowledge of public health," Mr. Tian said. "He caused this serious situation in Linhe. This is about human lives lost."
A strongly worded article on Dr. Li that ran in People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, suggested a search for a scapegoat. "He knew he had SARS," the article said, but "forced his way out of a quarantine area." It went on, "He spread the virus, caused the death of his parents and wife, and created a serious disturbance in anti-SARS work."
Friends and relatives declined to comment on the case. They said they were searching for a lawyer to represent Dr. Li and would have to trust the judicial system.
Li Rong, his brother, said he understood the impulse to hold an individual responsible for the deadly epidemic. But he says people should realize that it makes no sense to blame victims.
"This is a contagious disease that no one knows how to treat," Mr. Li said. "It cannot be said to be one person's fault."
Linhe, he said, really imported SARS from Beijing. So, Mr. Li asked, "is someone going to indict Beijing?" |
Beijing responds by indicting him. 
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15-05-2003 20:44
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