But the father of two picked up the SARS virus while flying to Beijing to promote his education system.
An infected man sitting 17 rows behind Frankie passed on the bug to 20 passengers and crew.
Frankie died in Hong Kong after a month-long battle with the illness.
His widow,Karen,41 said yesterday:"He was so lucky to survive September 11. He should not have died like this."
(3)The Daily Telegraph,July 5,2003,Saturday (Filed:April 24,2003). “Beijing shuts its schools to arrest spread of SARS as WHO issues new travel warnings”by Richard Spencer in Beijing.
Beijing shuts its schools to arrest
spread of Sars as WHO issues new
travel warnings
The authorities in Beijing announced that they were closing all primary and middle schools in the city for a month as they stepped up measures to halt the spread of Sars.
About 1.7 million pupils in the Chinese capital have been told to stay at home from today.
Amid growing concern over the spread of the deadly new form of viral pneumonia,the World Health Organisation confirmed that it was adding Beijing municipality and the northern province of Shanxi to the two other parts of China - Guangdong and Hong Kong - covered by its international travel alert. This warns people against "non-essential" travel to these areas.
It also added to the list Toronto - the worst-affected area outside Asia - which suffered its 16th death from the disease yesterday. The advice will be reconsidered in three weeks.
As the number of Sars fatalities in Beijing rose to 35,and the overall totals for China and Hong Kong both passed 100- the authorities began showing signs of concern that their decision at the weekend to come clean about the scale of the disease might be too late.
Reports have come in from distant parts of the country of many more cases than the provincial figures show. The health authorities are now attempting to match some of the stringent controls put in place a month ago in Singapore.
Besides closing its schools,Beijing has ordered trains,buses and stations to be disinfected,and is trying,apparently to little avail,to discourage people from travelling.
The government has shortened the week-long May Day holiday and has told students to stay at their universities even if their classes have been cancelled. Despite this,railway stations were full of people
returning to their home towns yesterday - raising concerns of the disease spreading in rural areas with poor health facilities.
A week ago,the official number of Sars cases in Beijing was only 30. By yesterday,the figure stood at almost 700 cases out of a total of more than 2,300 on the Chinese mainland. Altogether,106 people have died on the mainland.
In Beijing,alarm has grown since the weekend when the authorities conceded there were far more cases than previously admitted and sacked the health minister and city mayor.
“Sacking the officials gives some explanation to the common people and calms down their anger,”said Li Mei,a worker at a Beijing state-owned company.“It shows that the new government has some determination.”
The authorities also ordered the arrest of a number of people for “fabricating and disseminating harmful information”by posting false internet reports on the disease.
In Hong Kong the number of cases rose by 24 yesterday to 1,458,and the number of deaths by six to 105.
The territory"s chief executive,Tung Chee-hwa,announced a package of measures worth almost ?1 billion to soften the economic impact of the Sars outbreak,which has devastated the travel,leisure and retail industries.
Hong Kong"s economy - already suffering from a long spell of deflation - has been hit hard by the Sars outbreak. The new financial measures will pay for tax cuts,loan guarantees and subsidies and create new jobs for the service sectors in an effort to keep the economy going.
Some estimates,including the government"s,say the effects of Sars will knock two per cent off the former British colony"s gross domestic product next year.
B. 三篇社论语料
(1)Guardian Unlimited:Economic dispatch/Special report:China,April 17,2003,Thursday. “All the prosperity in China”by Victor Keegan.
All the prosperity in China
China looks set to become the locomotive of the world"s economic recovery,explains Victor Keegan.
Thursday April 17,2003
When economists talk about the global slowdown,they do not mean what they say. What they really mean is the economic slowdown in the west - with Japan usually thrown in as an honorary western economy.
If they were to travel to east Asia they would suddenly find themselves in the middle of a boom,notwithstanding the undoubted debilitating effects of the Sars virus.
Hong Kong,Malaysia,the Philippines and Thailand are all expanding at between 5% and 6% while South Korea (the broadband centre of the world) is steaming ahead at 6.8%. And these are just the relative failures.
The big success story is China,the most populated country in the world,which has long taken over the role of being the prime engine of east Asian growth from Japan. Figures released this week show that China"s economy was expanding at more than 9% (annualised rate) in the first quarter of the year.
That compares with growth this year of only 0.5% in Germany (which is supposed to be Europe"s prime engine of growth) and 4.3% in Russia.
The former Soviet empire could be forgiven for wondering whether it would have been better off going for a controlled transition to a market economy as China has done,rather than the Big Bang it adopted with western encouragement.
It would almost certainly have done better if it had - but that is not the main reason for China"s spectacular success. It is a much more homogenous country than Russia and has a strong entrepreneurial culture that Russia lacks.
There is no particular reason to suppose that Chinese economic growth is running out of steam. The country is only just beginning to satisfy the underlying demand for the consumer goods that the west has taken for granted.