BEIJING – A GROUP of foreign tourists were being held on Monday against their will in a hotel in Tibet over swine flu fears in what one angry traveller said was a ‘completely inefficient’ and lengthy process.
The 24-strong group was taken to a hotel in Zhangmu – a town near Nepal – after one of the tourists was diagnosed with a mild fever when crossing the border, fellow traveller Anna Husarska told AFP by phone.
‘It’s completely inefficient the way that things are run,’ she said. ‘First we had to wait for half a day for the ambulance to come and pick us up, then they took us to this hotel and they put us here, and we had to wait for a day and a half for the doctor to arrive.’
‘And the only thing the doctor did was to take the blood of the Italian woman who had a temperature, and now he’s driving back to Lhasa.’
She said the group – which had come for an eight-day tour of Tibet – was being treated well, but had developed no symptoms.
‘There is no danger among us, there is no temperature, and it’s a big show of how much we care for our borders, but it’s done at our expense,’ she said.
Ms Husarska compared the situation she and the rest of the group were in to a scene from a science fiction movie. ‘The people who are guarding us are in white suits with masks on their mouths, they look like they’re from Star Trek,’ she said.
‘We have asked to leave as many of us have flights from Kathmandu (Nepal’s capital) on the 23rd, but we will be really stuck here.’
China has reported three cases of A(H1N1) flu, which so far has killed over 70 people globally, and has urged local authorities to stay vigilant to prevent the spread of the virus in the populous nation.
But it has come under strong criticism from some countries over its treatment of foreigners coming from flu-affected areas such as Mexico, where the virus first emerged. Mexico has accused Beijing of discriminating against its citizens by quarantining them even when they had no flu symptoms and had not travelled from Mexico, and Canadian officials have raised similar concerns.
