| About 1,000 villagers in eastern China surrounded a local government office on Monday in a violent protest against the quarantine of suspected SARS patients near their homes, a police official said.
The villagers in the town of Xiandie in coastal Zhejiang province smashed and overturned police and government cars, and demanded that the patients, quarantined in the poorly equipped office building, be moved away.
"They are furious because they don't want the sick people so close to their homes," said an official at the Xiandie police station who gave her surname as Zhuang.
The rioting had halted but the villagers remained at the compound gate, and police from the area had been sent to disperse the crowd, she said.
About six to eight patients with high fevers who came from Beijing and other SARS-afflicted areas had been quarantined in the building since Saturday, she added.
The riot in Zhejiang, which has three confirmed SARS infections and four suspected cases, followed another large-scale protest sparked last week by fear over the deadly disease in Chagugang, a township 45 miles southeast of Beijing.
Villagers there rioted over a plan to use an abandoned school to quarantine Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome patients.
THREAT TO SOCIAL STABILITY
China's new leaders headed by President Hu Jintao, who took office in March, worry that SARS-related violence will erode the carefully guarded bedrock of social stability and could pose the kind of political challenge that disgruntled farmers and the unemployed have raised in the recent past.
On April 20, they sacked the Beijing mayor and health minister for covering up the extent of the SARS spread.
They then ordered heightened health education campaigns, daily reporting of SARS infections and large scale disinfection of public areas and transportation, and gave the media more freedom to report on the disease.
China said on Monday that nine more people had died from SARS and another 160 were infected, taking the national death toll to 206 and the number of cases to 4,280.
The incidents highlight deep public distress over SARS. Officials and ordinary Chinese fear the spread of the disease to the country's vast and poor hinterland, where healthcare systems are no match for the highly infectious virus.
Anxious to head off public anger at officials, the government has been moving to crack down on officials who mishandle efforts to stem the spread of the disease.
On Sunday, Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, sacked 10 Zhuozhou city officials, including a deputy Communist Party boss, a deputy mayor and the director of the city health bureau for "unsatisfactory performance in the fight against SARS," the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The officials were blamed for dereliction of duty in handling the case of a woman who accompanied her husband to a Beijing hospital in early April, and then came down with a fever in Zhuozhou 12 days later.
She received treatment in a local clinic and a hospital, and was then sent to a hospital in the city of Baoding where she was diagnosed with SARS on April 26. She died on April 30, it said.
Xinhua said the Zhuozhou officials failed to take effective measures to prevent the woman from infecting her husband, son, daughter-in-law and several other people, all of whom either contracted SARS or are suspected of having contracted the virus.
Source: Reuters | |
