The government, business and academic world are coming together to thrash out the crisis management issues posed by the SARS epidemic. They say that even though the disease's impact is temporary, it does offer long－term operational lessons. The assessment emerged during a Beijing workshop, jointly sponsored by the Boao Forum for Asia and the Asian Development Bank.

Criticism outweighs compliments at the forum. Economists, entrepreneurs and foreign diplomats are using the event to do a postmortem on the SARS epidemic so far. Alistair Nicholas is from the leading US－based PR company Edelman. He says speed is key in a crisis.

"Two ingredients of crisis management, speed and open communication. In a time of high technology, if you don't communicate openly, someone else will communicate for you," said Alistair J. Nicholas, general manager of Edelman （China） Beijing Office.

The crisis has also brought into question the monitoring systems and overall health care network on the Chinese mainland, as well as other Asian countries. Some say traditional ideas need to change.

"One of the major concerns is that generally in Chinese society, the link between economic development and health is not established in a sense that investment in health can help maintain healthy economic growth. They are only regarded as costs," said Kerstin Leitner of UN Development Program.

This means the health sector has been neglected. And in China, the situation is compounded by the challenge to manage the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. It's led to a dangerous imbalance.

"In China, over the last 20 years, public spending has gone down from 25 percent to 16 percent of the overall health system. Private spending rise to 61 percent. Only people that can afford could get good medical service. That's very dangerous," said Kerstin Leitner.

As a result, Leitner believes poor people in rural areas have increasingly less access to quality health care and the gap between the city and the country is widening. Forum participants agree that the likelihood of future epidemics will be greatly reduced if fiscal and administrative changes are applied to the public health system.

SARS is not the first, nor will be the last medical crisis to cast a shadow over the planet. But it does offer lessons on how we can cope with similar situations in the future. If we take those lessons on board, SARS may finally have something to contribute to the health of the nation.

(CCTV.com May 16, 2003)