In Max Brooks’ World War Z the plague that causes zombies to overrun the world begins in China. The Communists attempted to cover up the plague, hiding the truth until it was too late.

The reports of a virus killing children in the P.R.C. and the governments ruthless crackdown on doctors who can’t cure the children reminded me a bit of the book when I read these articles. The first is a Reuters report:

BEIJING (Reuters) – Fears of a virus that has killed at least 26 children in China gripped parents in Beijing on Tuesday amid a spreading outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease.

The health scare prompted the Foreign Ministry to seek to assure the country it was doing its best to contain the outbreak.

“The Chinese government is paying great attention to the virus and related departments are taking effective measures to stop it from spreading,” ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference.

Hand, foot and mouth is a common illness in children and infants caused by a family of viruses called enteroviruses and outbreaks regularly occur in China.

But the current outbreak has led to fatalities mostly when linked with enterovirus 71 (EV71), which can cause a severe form of the disease that can lead to high fever, paralysis and viral meningitis.

Some 11,905 cases of hand, foot and mouth have been reported in China this year, the official Xinhua news agency said. EV71 has caused 26 deaths, largely in Fuyang, a city in China’s eastern province of Anhui. At least two deaths were in the southern province of Guangdong.

All of the deaths in Fuyang were of children under six years old and most were under two.

[…]

China, which initially covered up the SARS epidemic in 2003, has denied a cover-up this time round and ordered authorities to aggressively tackle hand, foot and mouth.

An editorial in Monday’s China Daily blamed the crisis in Fuyang on a “delayed reaction” by the local government.

The Chinese government is blaming the doctors that treated many of the victims for their deaths in a move transparently designed to make those deaths look as if they were avoidable. From BrietBart.com:

Ten doctors and officials in China have been punished for mishandling a virus that has killed 26 children, state media reported as the number of infected youngsters rose to nearly 12,000.

The punishments have been meted out in the eastern Anhui province, where the bulk of the deaths have occurred and local officials have been accused of being too slow to report the disease, Xinhua news agency said late on Monday.

The virus is called enterovirus 71, or EV71, which leads to hand, foot and mouth disease.

EV71 is highly contagious and spreads through direct contact with the mucus, saliva or faeces of an infected person. Young children are most susceptible because of weaker immune systems.

As of Monday, it had infected 11,905 children nationwide, killing 26 of them, Xinhua reported, citing government figures.

The outbreak caused the Ministry of Health to declare a national alert over the weekend and establish a task force to liaise with local officials on control efforts.

In Anhui, one village doctor was fined 4,080 yuan (583 dollars) for illegally injecting 17 children with immune globulin, falsely claiming it would cure them, according to Xinhua.

The doctor, Wang Dongjun, charged 80 yuan for each injection, while five local county officials have been reprimanded for not distributing information about the virus.

Their failure to tell the people in Lichen village about the nature of the virus allowed Wang to “profiteer” from the disease, Xinhua reported, without saying what happened to the mistreated patients.

[…]

Sections of China’s state-run media have been highly critical of how authorities in Fuyang handled the outbreak, because children first started falling ill in March but the problem was not made public until last week.

That’s rich. China’s state run media is saying there was a cover up.

So if the government is willing to admit to nearly 12,000 people infected with this killer virus just before the Olympics, how many more do you think are really infected?