HONG KONG - All those contingency plans by news agencies for
responding to Iraqi chemical weapon attacks or al-Qaeda bioterrorism
are proving surprisingly useful in covering Mother Nature's
ongoing assault of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
Indeed, news agencies in Asia are taking some drastic precautions,
although journalists are still placing themselves in great danger
- often to their editors' discomfort - to report on the contagious,
poorly understood new virus that has killed 159 people and infected
3,293 people worldwide through Wednesday.
Time magazine has a fifth of its Hong Kong staff working from
home so that an infection doesn't result in a quarantine of
the newsroom that would paralyze operations. The Wall Street
Journal has three-fourths of its staff doing the same, and,
as of Monday, it stopped sending reporters to daily briefings
that are televised, partly to prevent them from contracting
the virus. And Reuters has moved half its staff to a separate
office building and virtually forbidden personal contact between
members of each half to ensure there's a crew available to work
if either group requires quarantine.
Thus far, only one journalist has been diagnosed with SARS,
a 32-year-old cameraman from state-run China Central Television.
All 22 floors of the network's Beijing headquarters were promptly
sprayed with disinfectant, staffers said. The man's name and
condition were not released.
"In a loose sense, this is just as serious as covering a war,"
CNN Beijing bureau chief Jaime FlorCruz said. "People are dying
of this disease, and it's a disease we're getting to know about
along the way. It's not like on a battlefield when you can anticipate
a missile or bullet might be coming at you."
CNN and other news agencies have explicitly told reporters
that anyone uncomfortable covering SARS may opt out, but none
have done so. Instead, the harder problem is in keeping journalists
from going too far in exposing themselves to danger and in ensuring
they wear face masks and wash their hands as often as possible.
Despite warnings from her bureau chief, Agence France-Presse
reporter Cindy Sui interviewed a SARS patient in Guangdong Province,
where the disease is believed to have originated.
"It was up to me, and I knew I wanted to try to go into the
hospital," said Sui, who stayed away from her office for two
weeks after the April 3 interview to wait out the possible incubation
period. "It was probably ignorance and stupidity, but it's an
amazing story."
In fact, Time editor Karl Taro Greenfeld issued a memo Wednesday
"to stress again the importance of taking precautions while
doing all out-of-office SARS reporting." Greenfeld also is quarantining
a reporter and photographer in a Beijing hotel room for 10 days
after the pair "had contact (with SARS patients) in such a way
that they need to be watched." Still, Greenfeld said, some of
the magazine's most hard-hitting coverage - showing Beijing
is understating the number of infections - couldn't be done
without going into pneumonia wards to count cases.
The story has been a crash course for Greenfeld and his staff
because, ironically, Time reporters who were trained to handle
bioterrorism have been in Iraq awaiting the chemical weapons
attacks by Saddam Hussein.
"If this thing, God willing, is contained in the next month
or two, it's still a blueprint for how to handle something really
horrible that might happen in the future," he said.
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