ABSTRACT
This chapter examines governance issues that severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) raises for public health in its post-Westphalian context. It describes public health governance that departs from the Westphalian template. The context of post-Westphalian public health makes China's historical and ideological phobias about threats to its public health sovereignty anachronistic and illegitimate. Chinese leaders probably realized that continuing to prohibit World Health Organization (WHO) assistance for Taiwan would only exacerbate the terrible political situation China had produced in its reaction to SARS. The SARS outbreak vindicated WHO's move to include non-governmental sources of information in global surveillance. The chapter presents the political pathology of SARS suggests that governance innovations taken to move public health into a post-Westphalian context contributed to the successful global response to a severe infectious disease threat. With HIV/AIDS, the post-Westphalian strategies represented increasingly desperate attempts to mitigate a public health nightmare of historic proportions.
