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SARS and the Internet
AndroidCat writes "In this story scientists who cracked SARS' genetic code credit the Internet as a key: 'The Internet has had a profound impact on how this data has been shared and how scientists have collaborated.' The Internet has also been useful in containing the outbreak by facilitating online discussion by ER doctors. Not mentioned in the stories is that Toronto researchers who were in quarantine were able to stay in touch. Slashdot has also covered Distributed Computing Attacking SARS. Go Internet!"
I often here friends and collegues disgusted by the Internet, or simply bored by it. There's nothing to do on it they claim except play some games, check a few popular web sites, instant message, etc. I always claim to them that the Internet still finds a tremendous use in the research community, stories like this confirm my findings. The Internet is only as limited as your imagination I guess. If you have an interest in anything academic, the Internet can certainly help you stray abreast of the major topics and discussions in a timely matter.
Actually, in BC, the Internet served an incredibly important role.
In Canada, one of the most remarkable things about the SARS outbreak (at least, IMHO) is that Vancouver, which is Canada's gateway to the pacific region, saw a relatively small SARS outbreak, as compared to Toronto, or many asian countries. This despite the fact that many infected travellers either passed through their airports, or actually disembarked there.
Recently, this fact was discussed in a piece on the CBC. In response, the BC health officials said they had been aware that something was coming down the pipe for some time now. This was possible, in part, because the Internet allowed for quick distribution of information regarding the mysterious disease outbreak in China. Many websites had been warning for months that there appeared to be a mysterious "atypical pneumonia" in existence, and that health officials in other countries should be on their toes. As a result, the BC health ministry requested that all hospitals immediately quarantine any patients who exhibited signs of atypical pneumonia.
This experience contrasts with what occured in Toronto, where the first SARS patient was admitted to a hospital, and, because the doctors there had no inkling about this upcoming disease, placed the patient in a room with two other patients, who also developed SARS. And thus began the outbreak in Toronto which, while in the end was handled quite well, still presented a serious challenge, as they simply weren't prepared for it.
So, in the end, BC fared very well. Why? Because the health officials there kept their ears to the ground. And they were able to do this, in part, because the Internet allowed them to gain and share information amongst one another quickly and easily.
As someone in public health, I can see both sides of the story.
Certainly, being able to share information quickly with others is useful. My scientific collaborations are (literally) all over the globe whereas 10 years ago I was lucky to be able to collaborate with labs within a few hundred miles.
But science works best by putting forth hypotheses, testing them, and eliminating the false ones. A downside of the net is that these hypotheses get spread as facts, are then amplified by the media, and then the truth gets ignored since a negative finding doesn't seem newsworthy as the original sensation.
SARS is bad, but it luckly hasn't been that bad so far in US (no deaths...*yet*). And I think undeserving of the sheer amount of attention it has received. But sexy new killer diseases always trump real boring old threats to your well being. SARS even managed to trump an otherwise other guaranteed reporting of the recent outbreak of Ebola in Africa. Let alone the much bigger but mundane killer of influenza (flu).
And in the age of HIPAA, you have to extrememly careful about what and how you share any kind of patient information (check out the forms the next visit to your physician or pharmacy). You cannot compromise patient confidentiality but it happens, due to ignorance or lazyiness, far too often.
There are two separate responses to this:
1. The distributed computing project attacking SARS is a giant hand-waving exercise. The technique it uses is simply molecular docking, which has been studied for years but hasn't been truly proved as a successful method to drug design. The people I know who use this sort of tool admit that right now the methods aren't very sensitive - the hope is that they'll at least be able to reduce the (vast) number of false positives that make it into experimental screening.
At any rate, the force fields used are still pretty theoretical. The problem with this project is that they're using a homologous viral protein (the site says "50-60% identity") because we obviously don't know the structures of the SARS proteins. The idea is that the active site is still well conserved, and that inhibitors should be analogous. Unfortunately, it's well known that molecules which appear to have pefect fits may still have poor binding kinetics or efficacy - they may not even make it to the target protein in vivo. So they're adding an approximation of structure on top of an already approximate technique.
If people are serious about doing computational drug design targeting this virus, they'd be better off determining the crystal structure of the proteins first, and improving the virtual library screening.
2. Ignoring (1), who cares if it's some big biotech who gets the results? Who the fuck else has the time, resources, and money to screen target compounds, mass-produce the drug, and get it past FDA review? The last I heard, D2OL was working with millions of candidate compounds. Assuming it works at all, the best it can do is narrow the field down to many thousands. Experimentally validating these compounds is something that virtually no public/academic labs could handle. Academicians are great at doing basic research, not this type of investigation.
Science magazine decided to give free access to its reports on the sequenced genome of SARS. Rather enlightened of them.
In this day and age, it is foolish to assume journalistic due diligence.
Don't base your numbers on things you've heard (no deaths in U.S.), or reported in the media (Singapore is in dire conditions).
Get numbers from the source: WHO
The U.S. has 2 confirmed deaths and 54 total cases.
Singapore has had 0 new cases for quite some time now. There has been, however, a local chain of transmission (hence the SARS affected designation).
Shamelessly taken from http://bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/fear/index
The press (and the people that pay attention to it) like to sensationalize things about 1) disease 2) man against man "crimes" 3) weather/natural disasters. When in actuality your much more likely to die from any number of other accidents than being a "victem" of these headline incidents.