Laurie Garrett’s question and answer session at the Turner Construction Student Forum covered topics ranging from possible epidemics to a criticism of the state of journalism.

The first question from the audience was about the 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia.

Garrett recounted her trip to Hong Kong and south China while the disease was beginning to spread.

“It hit me how hard the situation was when I got into the Tokyo airport and the terminal to China was deserted. I was the only person in the first class cabin.”Garrett described the situation on the ground as unusual and panicked.

“I was one of three people staying in this elegant hotel in downtown Hong Kong. They refused to let me into the lobby until I put a mask on.”

She traveled throughout parts of the country investigating how serious the epidemic actually was. At the time, the Chinese government was covering up new cases and health experts had a hard time determining the severity of the outbreak.

When asked if governments and health experts overreacted, she said it would be easy to say that, but “it was an unknown agent that we had never seen before and it was being spread easily.” Garrett declared that the response was appropriate and all the precautions taken at the time were necessary.

Garrett then discussed the bird flu, what she calls the most

likely outbreak in the future.

“We’re looking at a very dire situation…all cases so far have a 75 percent mortality rate, which is incredibly high,” she said.

The first cases of the bird flu in humans surfaced in China and Hong Kong in the late 1990s and the second wave appeared in Vietnam last year. Garrett mentioned that millions of chickens have been slaughtered as a preventative measure to stop the spread of the disease.

Garrett was asked what she though about efforts by the U.S. government to prevent and defend citizens from bioterrorism.

“We’ve spent billions since September 11th to prepare for any attacks and a lot of those dollars have been diverted and not spent properly.”

The downturn in the economy over the past few years forced states to slash their budgets in order to be balanced. The states saw the federal bioterrorism funding coming in and slashed their own public health funding.

“The states have been using the bioterror money to purify water and have breast cancer awareness instead of preparing for a biological attack,” she said. “Not much has changed in our preparedness since 9/11.”

Garrett was also asked about her journalism career, in which she won a Pulitzer, Peabody and two Polk awards.

“I actually retired from journalism last week. More and more of the enterprises that used to produce good journalism don’t anymore,” she said. She encouraged any journalism students in the audience to work hard and not to fall into the trap of covering sensational stories for the sake of selling newspapers.

Garrett is currently the Gates Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a writer for Newsday. She was also a science correspondent for National Public Radio and has written two best selling books in 1994 and 2000.