Asia fights on its own against flu pandemic

Michael Vatikiotis, New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur

As the world prepares to combat a potential flu pandemic that could kill millions, it's worth recalling one of the uglier sides of a global health crisis, which is the way that states react and treat one another when human lives are threatened by disease. Asia knows this all too well, as it bore the brunt of the severe acute respiratory syndrome crisis that killed fewer than 800 people in early 2003, but triggered a global panic that closed borders and brought business virtually to a standstill in some of the world's most vibrant economies.

If you lived in Hong Kong when SARS struck, you felt like a pariah. Deemed the epicenter of the disease early on, businesses closed their doors and anyone who worked for an international company in Hong Kong was quickly advised not to travel to home base for they would not be welcome.

The Prime Minister of Singapore had to make sure he didn't have a temperature ever so slightly above normal, otherwise he would not have been allowed in the White House.

The human instinct for self-preservation transcends the niceties of diplomacy and corporate responsibility.

Imagine what will happen to Southeast Asia and greater China, where media reports frequently observe that "animals and humans live in close proximity", if the bird flu goes airborne? Borders will snap shut, foreigners will flee for their lives and there won't be the same offers of help that we saw in the case of the tsunami or South Asian earthquake. Understandably, governments elsewhere in the world will need to think of their own people first.

Some countries, such as New Zealand, Hong Kong and China, have already declared they will close their borders. In Australia, preparations are being made to quarantine visitors in aircraft hangars.

This is what makes a bird flu pandemic one of the biggest challenges to the idea of globalization. Which president or prime minister of a Western country will dare devote a nanosecond of time to the plight of Asians when millions of their own people could die? What currency will much-vaunted commitments to collective security have when there is the prospect of mass graves in Boston or Berlin?

Even the reach of the largest superpower in the world, the United States, will be limited. Mothers won't want their sons exposed to a deadly virus that kills half the people it infects, so don't expect to see the marines in their Chinooks distributing antiviral drugs or respirators. This will leave the region to its own devices and enhance the stature and power of regional powers like India and China that will be forced to fill the breach. Asia will need to help itself.

The pandemic won't last long, but it will kill the poor, the weak and the undernourished mercilessly; it will prey on areas where investment in health care has been minimal, which is most of Asia. Meanwhile, large Western drug companies that manufacture antiviral drugs are up in arms over threats by Indian and Chinese companies to make cheap clones.

For much of the past 60 years, Asia has relied on a global system that came to its aid when help was needed. In return, Asians, when possible, have reciprocated -- as seen recently during the relief operation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The world is plagued by inequality and a global system has evolved ways of addressing it -- but mainly by urging those better off and better protected to help those who are less well- endowed.

What happens in a crisis that affects the whole world the same way? Like the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, bird flu isn't going to select its victims on the basis of gross domestic product.

Is there something that could be done to anticipate and address this coming unraveling of the great globalization equation? The United Nations certainly doesn't have the power or the guns to enforce global cooperation. Perhaps it should.

Asia must prepare for the worst. As the part of the world most likely to see the first victims of human to human transmission (there are already references to "ground zero") governments in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam should be prepared to be told: There's a limit to how much help they will get -- and that's only until the day the virus sweeps the world. Then it's every country for itself.

The writer is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.