By Jolene FarleyEricka Erickson returned abruptly to the United States last month after studying at Beijing University, Beijing, China. Erickson, 21, a junior media studies major, arrived in China on Wednesday, Feb. 12, with a group of eight other exchange students from Pitzer College, Claremont, Calif. She is the granddaughter of Wendell and Kathryn Erickson, Hills.Studying both Chinese and traditional medicine at the Medical School of Beijing University, Erickson was called home after school officials at Pitzer College determined the severity of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Erickson, a Sioux Falls, S.D., native, arrived back in the United States on Wednesday, April 23. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department issued a travel warning in the first part of April suggesting that U.S. citizens defer non-essential travel to China because of SARS concerns.While concerns about SARS were mounting in China, the students in Beijing couldn’t get a straight answer on the severity of the virus, according to Erickson.Erickson said when she arrived in China, the SARS virus was in Hong Kong but hadn’t spread to Beijing."They (government officials) weren’t talking about how many people had it," she said. "You couldn’t assess how big of a threat it was." After reading about the SARS scare in U.S. newspapers, three of the students in Erickson’s group decided to go home."The rest of us had made the decision to stay and almost as soon as that happened, we were told to go home," she said. The day after Erickson left for the United States, Chinese officials quarantined the hospital where she attended classes on the Beijing campus. Students were confined to campus unless granted permission to leave. If allowed to leave, it was for only an hour. "It was probably one of the more dangerous places to be on that campus," she said.Residents in the hospital worked in other facilities and could have easily spread the virus. During the last week of her stay, whenever she left her residence she wore a mask. Many residents in Beijing already owned masks because of summer dust storms and severe air pollution.Erickson said she isn’t critical of the way the Chinese government handled informing the public of the outbreak. She thinks maybe officials thought it would cause a panic or more people to come into the city for medical treatment. Erickson said she didn’t have any problems entering the United States.She was given a card saying, "Please monitor your health" with a list of SARS symptoms."They were pretty nonchalant about it," she said. Thankfully, after two weeks in the United States, Erickson has shown no symptoms of SARS.Erickson was more concerned about public sentiment in China against the war in Iraq.The students were warned not to visit places where Americans usually gathered because of the threat of bombing.Erickson said she would love to go back to China and will continue to study the Chinese language in college. She doubts she will have the same experiences she would have had if she could have stayed in Beijing. Plans to stay with a rural Chinese family and to take a train ride across Asia to Russia were cancelled when she was forced to return to the United States.
