Written like a novel, China Syndrome is rather a strange beast, a cross between an erratically written social excursion to the seamier side of contemporary China, a bullet point thriller and a paranoid sandwich board proclaiming the end is nigh. Ostensibly the ‘true story of the 21st century’s first great epidemic’, its powerful doom-mongering seems to be its principal selling point, as its reviewer blurb promises: ‘if you take this book to bed, don’t expect to get any sleep’. Well I did, and I slept fine. You can’t spend your nights sweating raw fear into your sheets over the threat of bird flu, however much Mr Greenfeld and his publishers want to shift his book.

As the editor of TIME Asia in Hong Kong, when the threat of SARS was raging, Greenfeld is well placed to comment on the hysteria and government duplicity that aggravated the outbreak, the heroic tales of brave virologists and medical staff who risked their own lives and careers to contain the virus, and the personal tragedies of a few of those individuals who caught the disease. Greenfeld’s book is quite brilliant in its initial chapters, charting with almost visceral glee the fleshy pit of disease, which is the ‘Click’ of Guangdong province, the great slums where any exotic animal may be slaughtered before your eyes and eaten, millions of viruses threatening to jump the species barrier in a blood-spat. The close proximity, the free movement, the prescription-free antibiotics which are making the once magic bullets ineffective, the grime and the dirt in which a superbug might spread like a fire through a dry heath, are all summed up in what Greenfeld translates as ‘the era of wild flavour’: China’s economic boom.

Greenfeld is a tour guide for the filthy underbelly of China and he executes his task with relish. Were the book entirely on China and the exhausting pace of its development, it could not have gone far wrong. But this same energy, enthusiasm and attention to detail is applied to everything indiscriminately, from descriptions of Greenfeld taking his daughter for a stroll and noticing the first precautionary mask on a jogger, to the personal lives of eminent virologists, to a rather extended preamble which narrates the history of humans and the plagues that have decimated them. In every chapter we start afresh along the same formula, a new figure has an epiphany and realises that, yes, we probably are all going to die. Eventually. The laboriousness of the argument gets a little wearing. Its knock out punch in the battle to prevent its reader getting a good night’s rest, is its insistence that if SARS does not re-emerge, something else will, and it is going to get us very, very soon. Bird flu has potential, Amazonian herpes might mutate, and then there’s Ebola… ‘these are the viruses programmed to kill’. To a virus, we’re all ‘fresh meat’ and the fresh meat in the China slums is ripe for the next outbreak:

I was back in the Click, strolling through dirty alleyways… slabs of protein layered in tiny little apartments… There would be another outbreak… this was common sense: too many people were living too close together with too many wild animals. Welcome virus.

Despite all this, however, the death tally bullet points which introduce each chapter note that at its peak on August 10, 2003, 8,445 were infected, and 876 dead from SARS. Which is not a particularly high mortality rate. Much as it may be out of fashion to be optimistic about the survival of the human race, these figures do not seem particularly devastating, and, of course, the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the Chinese government maintained for an extremely long period that there was absolutely no epidemic, and threatened to send medical workers to labour camps if they leaked the true state of the virus to the wider public. The infection rate among doctors and nurses was also worryingly high, though the virus was not as virulent or infectious as influenza. But this is China, where the state of healthcare is quite different from in the west. Much as the NHS is pushed, it is not in the state of the Chinese medical service, where many people do not go to a hospital because even a small hospital bill may represent a month’s wages.

There is no point arguing that China Syndrome is simply about China. The book is about what China’s rash economic boom, its fast and precarious living, may unleash upon the rest of us. The book is meant to scare, but as with a libellous rumour one must look for the facts before one is published and damned. Succumbing to abject paranoia could only aggravate the situation when it does eventually come. By all means governments accross the world should be planning for when a virus does break out among us, but until then it is best to lay quiet in our beds without feeling the urge to read hit and miss, rather badly written, novelised thrillers penned by the editor of TIME Asia.