EON

Harsh Government Response Takes Heavy Toll

Hong Kong- The official government response to a common childhood disease points to how the propaganda machine in China controls how even necessary information is communicated to its citizens, even with its citizens increasingly educated and able to comprehend different concepts.

The Chinese are currently weathering an outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease. This disease, called HFMD for short has struck 8,531 children and is believed to have started in the eastern Anhui province in China, and affects children below the age of two.

There have been twenty-five children living in Fuyang City that have died from the latest outbreak of HFMD.

The government allowed any official acknowledgement of an outbreak to simmer for weeks, and it was only in late April after it had been striking down children for a number of weeks that the state controlled Xinhua media was allowed to acknowledge and report on it.

The lack of information has taken a toll on how well the authorities in the different provinces have been able to battle the disease. In China, even relatively harmless information is sometimes quashed rather than report negative issues, and sometimes this lack of information causes more harm than the news or issue itself.

While there is no word of an official cover-up, the slowness of the disease to be accurately reported undoubtedly caused more people to become infected than was necessary. Local doctors did not know what they were dealing with, and some had never seen HFMD before so in some cases when they figured out what they were dealing with it was nearly too late.