If anything was to be learned from last year’s outbreak of a mysterious disease in China, it is that the country’s penchant for secrecy allowed severe acute respiratory syndrome to spread nearly unabated for months. So it is distressing to read that China once again is trying to keep under wraps the latest SARS outbreak.

The government has reported three cases of the disease so far. If that is all there is – given past attempts to hide SARS cases, there is little reason to believe it is – that is good news. However, at the same time that the government is issuing official reports of SARS cases it is punishing those in the media who report on the extent of the illness.

Last week, seven Chinese journalists were detained after police stormed the offices of the Southern Metropolis Daily in Guangzhou, the commercial center of Guangdong, the region where the disease was deemed by the World Health Organization to have started in November 2002. Both of this year’s cases are in Guangdong. One involves a 32-year-old freelance television producer who was released from the hospital Thursday and the other a 20-year-old waitress.

When residents began falling ill in the southern province of Guangdong in late 2002, the Chinese government did not share this information with the WHO or any other international body. First it denied that a mysterious illness was killing people, then it only nominally helped track the disease. The result was a three-month delay in the search for a detection test and a cure. In the end, it is estimated that 800 people died of SARS as the disease spread through 27 countries.

Given these deaths, it is intolerable that the Chinese government is again going down the same path, albeit with less vigor. The Southern Metropolis Daily was the first media outlet to report the fresh SARS outbreak. Chinese authorities confirmed the first SARS case after the paper’s reports last month. Earlier this week, police stormed the paper’s offices and detained a top editor and six business executives. Employees at the paper, which is state owned, said the men were questioned about financial crimes, a move the paper’s staff viewed as retribution for its SARS coverage.

If Chinese officials should have learned anything from the deaths of their countrymen, and others around the world, it is that disclosing the SARS outbreak at its initial onset would have saved lives. If that isn’t compelling enough, since advisories were posted against travel to China and other SARS hot spots, a more forthright acknowledgement of the disease could also have helped the Chinese economy.

Knowing their costs, denials and attacks on journalists should not be tolerated this time around.