ISLAMABAD: Jiang Yanyong, a former Chinese military surgeon who revealed the full extent of the 2003 Sars outbreak and was later placed under house arrest for his political outspokenness, has died aged 91, family friends and a Hong Kong newspaper said Tuesday.
Jiang died of pneumonia Saturday in Beijing, according to human rights activist Hu Jia and the South China Morning Post.
He was praised for saving lives after writing a letter in the early stage of the Sars crisis revealing that Chinese officials were playing down the threat.
The Sars Whistleblower
Sars infected more than 8,000 people around the world in 2003. Of these, 774 died, according to the stats of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Jiang was working in a Beijing hospital in April 2003, when he was alarmed to hear the Chinese health minister telling the public that a new deadly respiratory disease had only affected a handful of people.
The senior doctor said he was aware of over a 100 cases of Sars – severe acute respiratory syndrome – in military hospital wards alone.
He sent a letter to Chinese state broadcasters, exposing the lies in the official narrative, but they ignored it. But the letter was then leaked to foreign media who published his account in full.
Jiang’s revelations forced the Chinese government to admit providing false information, and spurred the WHO into action, prompting the overnight imposition of strict containment measures which helped slow the spread of the virus.
China’s health minister and Beijing’s mayor at the time were also sacked following the revelations.
