Quote Originally Posted by publiusr View Post
I don't know that I would agree with that. Take the Chinese response to SARS as described here: http://www.discovermagazine.com/2012...ter-ian-lipkin

Some quotes: "The Chinese consulate invited me to a magnificent banquet at an East Side Chinese restaurant in New York. Halfway through the meal they said to me, we need you to go to Beijing tonight. People were dying there...Chen Zhu, now China’s minister of health, was waiting at the airport with a red carpet. The streets were deserted. Tiananmen Square was empty. The Forbidden City was empty. The next morning we went to the Great Hall, and I’m told I am there to design their SARS program. There were 250 people waiting to hear what I wanted them to do. When I went back to see Chen Zhu, he was in a hospital with an unexplained liver problem. At the nursing station they didn’t even have soap. The first thing I did was sit down with him, and I said, you must do two things for me. There can be no spitting on the sidewalks because this spreads all these germs. And doctors and nurses coming to see you must wash their hands. By the time I left his room half an hour later, there was a prohibition against spitting on sidewalks and there was soap and water and paper towels in hospitals."

Now compare that to how doctors and scientists are treated here, what with the anti-vaccine nuts. People argue with experts all over the blogosphere and get away with all kinds of crap.
In the US, "anti-vaccine nuts" already use soap and water and paper towels though I'm not sure about the not-spitting part. Part of the problem is that as a technology gets less obvious and more technical more people will not understand it well enough to believe in it. So, why didn't the Chinese hospital have soap and water is probably a good question? Should we believe that they unfamiliar with the Germ Theory of disease?