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Even With SARS, Globalization Marches On Exotic Market Yields a SARS Clue



 
 
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Old September 11th, 2003, 07:18 PM
Mighty Land
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Default Even With SARS, Globalization Marches On Exotic Market Yields a SARS Clue

Robyn Meredith(Forbes)

NEW YORK - Executives in Asia say the health crisis triggered by the
outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, will crimp
travel and trade in Asia temporarily but won't cause companies to stop
using Asian factories as the workshop to the world.

"There is no turning back from increased cost savings and efficiencies
that companies are experiencing from expanding their supply chains to
different parts of the world," says David L. Cunningham Jr., president
of FedEx unit FedEx Asia Pacific. "Over the long term, we are going to
see continued globalization and international trade as more companies
depend on sourcing and selling across the globe." By his count, 20% of
goods bought in one country are made in a different country, but that
will rise to 80% by 2020.

Worldwide, 2,722 people have been sickened and 106 killed so far by
the deadly pneumonia. The spread of the illness from the Southern
Chinese city of Guangzhou to the transport hub of Hong Kong and, from
there, around the globe underscores how interconnected the world has
become.

Even the places hardest hit by SARS should rebound, says Cunningham.
"The Hong Kong and Southern China economies are major players in
Asia's high-tech industrial complex and that is set to continue over
the long term," says Cunningham. "This means that FedEx will continue
to be the logistical backbone for these high-value items that are
manufactured in Asia and sold in more developed nations across the
globe."

That view is seconded by Alfredo Gangotena, chief executive of
Priceline.com's Asia branch, Hutchison-Priceline, founded with the
Hong Kong-based financial and manufacturing powerhouse Hutchison
Whampoa.

"The whole travel industry is having difficulty, as travelers are
canceling their trips due to SARS and the Iraq war," says Gangotena,
who is based in Hong Kong. "We will aim at counteracting this by
launching a series of new product offers that we will announce in
May."

In the long term, "I don't believe that SARS or the Iraq war will have
long-lasting effects on trends such as globalization," says Gangotena.
"The engine of globalization, the West, isn't going to feel the pinch
and will steam ahead."

"We had the same war in Iraq back in 1991, which was followed by a
major economic boom throughout the 1990s," he adds. "We had mad cow
disease in the West a few years ago, and it feels like a distant
memory already. The world is used to dealing with crisis, and
experience shows that none have stopped the major trends of progress."

In the short term, the SARS crisis may have even boosted traffic on
transport companies like FedEx and United Parcel Service. "Flight
cancellations by many passenger airlines have resulted in limited
capacity for the movement of goods by air," says Ken Torok, president
of UPS Asia Pacific. "We are currently working with our customers on
contingencies to keep their supply chains going." UPS, like FedEx, has
its own fleet of planes, which allows for more flexibility in cargo
shipments.

Despite the SARS crisis, Asia will remain part of the global supply
chain. "Short or long term, as a cost-effective supplier of raw
materials and highly skilled labor, Asia will continue to remain the
value-added workshop of the world," says Torok. "What will change is
how businesses will look at contingency planning, risk management and
how to ensure supply chains remain undisrupted in times of crises."

Economists agree. "Fear of SARS is more of a problem than SARS now, as
far as international business is concerned," says Linda Lim, a
professor of corporate strategy and international business at the
University of Michigan Business School.

"In this day of modern communications technology, much if not most
international business will continue, except via different forms like
teleconferences and e-mails," Lim says. "Face-to-face meetings will
eventually resume, especially once the infection has been contained or
burns itself out and we know more about it."

Those who have been helping multinationals do business in China agree.
"I very much doubt this has any long-term impact as long as it is now
over relatively quickly," says Carl Walter, China chief operating
officer of J.P. Morgan Chase based in Beijing.

However limited the long-term effects will be, the short-term fallout
is painful.

"The virtual cessation of tourism and contraction of service
consumption may be pushing a number of economies into recession," says
Morgan Stanley economist Andy Xie. "Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan
may well be sliding towards recession. Malaysia and Thailand are at
risk also."

Drug Does Not Work Against SARS:
http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/04/1..._0411sars.html

(Mighty Land) wrote in message . com...
By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Sept. 4 (HealthDayNews) -- It was just your typical
live-animal food market in Shenzhen, China, with a palm civet here, a
raccoon-dog there on display for the benefit of chefs, but it provided
an important hint about the way an innocuous virus that lives
peacefully in the human respiratory tract became the deadly virus
SARS, researchers say.

Swabs from two Himalayan palm civets, members of a cat-like family,
turned up a coronavirus resembling one that is carried by many humans
but does no harm, scientists at the University of Hong Kong report in
the Sept. 5 issue of Science. The virus was also found in a
raccoon-dog and a ferret badger from the same market, and in some
employees at the market.

Although the workers showed no signs of illness, the discovery
"indicates a route of interspecies transmission" that created the
severe acute respiratory syndrome virus, the report says.

"The concept here is that we know that coronaviruses are mutable,"
says Dr. Philip Tierno, director of clinical microbiology and
immunology at New York University Medical Center and author of The
Secret Life of Germs.. "But it was not known previously that animal
and human strains could recombine to become more profoundly infective
that the human strains we knew in the past."

The animal market was a logical place to look, the Hong Kong
researchers explain, because the first cases of SARS, reported last
November, occurred in restaurant workers from that region who handled
wild mammals regarded as exotic foods. The Shenzhen market had a
variety of species, held individually in small wire cages, that came
from different regions of China.

"The Chinese lay out animals in open markets and sell for food animals
we wouldn't eat, and that cohort together," Tierno says. "You have
humans working in close proximity with these animals. If an animal is
slaughtered, viruses can spread from animal to human."

Genetic analysis shows a family resemblance between the human and
animal coronaviruses, the report says, although the human SARS virus
is missing a large segment found in the animal virus.

The discovery indicates that the open-air markets are places where
SARS-like animal viruses can "amplify and transmit to new hosts,
including humans, and this is critically important from the public
health point of view," the researchers write.

But it isn't clear that any of the virus-carrying animals in that
market were the original source of the virus, they say. It is
conceivable that they were all infected "from another, as yet unknown
animal source, which is in fact the true reservoir in nature."

Much more work in markets, in the wild and in laboratories "will help
to better understand the animal reservoirs in nature and the
inter-species events that led to the origin of the SARS outbreak," the
researchers say.

Meanwhile, a report by a panel of Central Intelligence Agency experts
warns that while the SARS outbreak has been contained after infecting
more than 8,400 people worldwide and causing about 815 deaths, the
disease could re-emerge this winter, the time when respiratory
diseases are most likely to spread.

"SARS has not been eradicated," says a report prepared by the National
Intelligence Council to CIA Director George G. Tenet. "We remain
vulnerable."

If the disease takes hold in Asian or African countries with
inadequate health-care systems, it could cause more deaths than the
first outbreak, the experts warn.

A quick response to contain the disease is necessary because
"currently, SARS has no vaccine, no effective treatment and no
reliable point-of-care diagnostic test," they say.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it plans to
have a better SARS surveillance system in place this year.

More information

Everything you need to know about SARS is available from the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control(
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars) and
Prevention or the World Health
Organization(http://www.who.int/csr/sars/en/index.html).

Related Articles

New research suggests SARS jumped from animals to humans in
China(AFP): http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...s_030905123249

SARS Linked to Virus Found in Animals(AP):
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...e/sars_virus_2

Sars-like viruses found in China(BBC):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3081478.stm

Scientists unveil 15-minute SARS test amid fears of epidemic's
comeback: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...s_030905120736

 




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