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SARS Contained
The World Health Organization has declared that SARS is contained, for now. Toronto has engaged in extensive analysis of the outbreak there, leading to a number of interesting and in-depth stories about the progression of the disease.
this flu season should be frightening. everyone will think they have the sars when it's just the flu.
counting down to the next outbreak of some other nasty bug like hantavirus, westnile, or ebola
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I live near Toronto, and there were celebrations all day today, and today was the first day that Canada's Wonderland was filled to near capacity. Holding a seasons pass this year, my delight at seeing SARS gone is kind of put off by the longer lines at the theme park. Don't get me wrong, it is a great thing, but... a two minute line up to get on Drop Zone is a tough thing to give up.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
How can they say they have the disease contained if they say, in their next breath, that they expect it to come back again?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
I should say that the SARS scarce has crippled our tourism economy because of all the media hype from around the world. Tourists don't even need to be worried about it because the only potential way of acquiring the disease is to be in the hospitals where the patients who have it are being quarantined.
Thankfully the city of Toronto has since been removed from the list of cities with SARS and hopefully the upcoming concert featuring the Rolling Stones will help promote our city and bring back the tourists in the masses.
We went to Ocean Park a couple of weeks ago. It was great to just walk on to any ride we wanted to ... of course the park was losing millions and reduced its hours. And personally I lost a lot of money as classes I teach were cancelled due to SARS hysteria. Kids still have to have their temperature taken at school each morning before beig allowed to go in. At least they don't have to wear the silly facemasks now (these work to prevent spread if you're infected, but are little or no help in stopping you from gettng it, especially as most don't fit them tightly).
This cartoon nicely sums up my opinion of the whole SARS thing:
http://www.vgcats.com/vgc_comics/?strip_id=62
Practical effect here in Toronto:
First outbreak: People were edgy for about two weeks, and a few wore masks. Anyone with a cold got nervous looks when they coughed. Then the novelty wore off and it was business as usual.
Second outbreak: Nil.
The number of people quarantined was about 1% of the city's population. The number of people who were actually sick was far lower. The number of people _dead_ was lower than the number of people murdered here in an average year, and we're a city not known for its violence.
Take is seriously? Sure. Panic? Not justified.
The real harm is that the attention on SARS has drawn attention away from things like West Nile Virus.
Yay, they've gotten SARS contained, whatever that means. Meanwhile we've got monkeypox to deal with (damn those Wisconsin domesticated prairie dog owners!) and the West Nile virus is scheduled to reach California this summer...
I guess we just have to deal with the fact that we're always going to have to deal with some disease or disaster. As much as we hate to admit it (even for steadfast believers in evolution) we are just animals, after all, and while we may have lots of medicines and other weapons on our side, nature has still got plenty of tricks up her sleeves too.
As soon as Toronto gets taken off the list there are massive celebrations and the same thing happened in Hong Kong. That's not a bad thing per say but I can't help but wonder if people are letting their guard down.
The Singapore government has done a fantastic job in containing and combating SARS and they continue to do so even after being of the WHO's list for sometime now. Daily temperature checks for public servants and temperature scanning at all ports of entry continue. They've even gone far as to develop a SARS channel on cable TV. Bottom line, we have to continue to live but not live ignorantly.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
An arrogant American? Who would have thought?
Is to remember when the WHO tried to announce that Malaria was eradicated from the earth.
Are there any Slashdotters out there with first hand perspectives on the current SARS situation in China? I've been wondering why outbreaks have only 'occured' in the big cities. Do smaller outbreaks in less well known cities not get picked up by Western media? With such densely populated cities, plus a few months of a head start in having SARS around, I find it rather remarkable that it was contained at all.
Heck, even Toronto had a second outbreak while everyone was still on alert. Mind you, that's not meant as an negative comment on my fellow Canadians, rather it's a statement of how hard it must be to contain this particular bug - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for error.
Sometimes, I question that. Maybe the reason we don't see them any more is that we aren't isolated for very many generations from any particular strain of the flu, and so it never has a chance to gain a large advantage over our immune systems. Hence, no epidemics.
I'm not saying this is a fact, but if you look at most of the epidemics we have nowadays, they fall into the following categories:
Given my residence in North America, I'm not too worried about ebola, and it's class of diseases as described above. It's very hit-and-miss, and rarely spreads outside of it's initial range. This may be due to infection vectors or other things, but they never seem to really take over in general (thankfully).
I'm also not too worried about West Nile, and others like it. Let's be realistic - if you're not very old, very young, or immune-compromised, your odds of catching it and dying (or even knowing) are lower than being struck by lightning.
Superbugs and the new diseases that we have no immunity are a lot more worrisome. These are having the greatest impact worldwide, and have no simple cures. I'm aware that developing nations suffer a lot more deaths than either of these causes from very well-known diseases, but they are easily preventable through proper hygiene and such - that's why they disappeared in most industrialized countries.
So, flus and such don't even get on my list. As long as we keep getting our regular exposures to the worldwide variants (and exporting ours
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Personally, I'm skeptical as to whether the disease is really contained...I will believe that Toronto is safe for now, but I disagree with anyone saying that China's SARS is contained. China is a huge nation, and I feel that if SARS went largely untreated over there(which is likely), then there could most certainly be a threat for people in China, and travelers, and for that matter all Asian countries. Now, everyone is saying how China's SARS outbreak is largely over, and I disagree. I think the Chinese government is hiding more than they wish to reveal. China is a budding superpower, and they wouldn't want something like this to tarnish their reputation, so they hide it. There's more to this than the media's telling us, I feel... _____________________
No. The reason there were no deaths in the US is it didn't spread in hospitals. The vast majority of deaths are when the disease spreads to the sick and elderly with chronic problems. The cases in the US are pretty much people who contracted the disease elsewhere and were young/healthy enough before hand to travel.
Besides, what makes you think you have better medicine in the US than they have in Hong Kong. The US health care system is crap.
A much better, more informative book, also much longer, is Lauri Garrett's The Coming Plague. I believe it won the Pulitzer. I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Garrett speak at the Capitola Book Cafe - she graduated from nearby UC Santa Cruz.
I later heard Ms. Garrett speak on the radio regarding public health. She said a survey found that a majority of Americans, when asked, said that they were opposed to public health.
(They were confused, and the confusion is unfortunate. The US doesn't have publicly funded medical care like Canada does, but public health is the reason the nation isn't swept with plagues every couple years. Things like mass vaccination, sewer treatment, mosquito abatement and the like. Americans are too dimwitted to know that that's what public health means.)
Both books talk quite a bit about Ebola, and The Hot Zone describes an event when a bunch of research monkeys were imported to the U.S. that were infected with an Ebola-like virus.
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In Canada, as in the U.S, health care in general is a provincial responsibility (with parts delegated to the county or municipal level), with federal assistance. The government of Ontario is currently conservative, small-govermnent (i.e. pro-cutbacks) one for the past decade or so. One of the things that were cut back were the disease researchers whose job it was to identify new diseases, develop tests and diagnostic procedures for them, and distribute this information. A typical politician, the Health Car Minister justified this by asking "what, is a brand new disease going to magically appear?".
Conversely, the past decade in BC has been a big-government (i.e. pro-spending) one, until recently (when a large fraction of the public sector was amputated). However, it has a more fully funded health care system, and was able to quickly react to the news of a new disease.
With Ontario's "immune system" essentially crippled, it fell on other provinces (including BC, where the responsible corona virus DNA was first sequenced) and the federal government to pick up the slack.
The relative merits of a mainly publically or mainly privately funded health care system can be debated, but one thing that any government should realize, regardless of it's political philosophy, is that whatever system it prefers, the one that exists must be fully supported even if it's counter to the party principles.
Another lesson to be learned is that the world is becoming too mobile to leave health care as a purely local responsibility. In the case of Canada, Ontario might have been helpless except for the federal research facilities near Winnipeg, Manitoba, because of its health and safety negligence (the same negligence was responsible for water safety problems in Walkerton which led to a similar number of deaths). Without effective research, the outbreak could have spread country-wide.
National governments may not be accountable enough either. China's government was downright deceitful over the spread of SARS in that country, and without international pressure and some wistle-blowers risking their jobs, the disease could still be spreading there.
The fallout from these problems would not have been limited to single nations. If SARS had spread across Canada, the U.S would have had to choose between closing the border (which is the single largest flow of imports and exports for both countries), seriously crippling the U.S economy in the middle of trying to recover from a recession (maybe enough to make it a depression, and killing G.W.Bush's chances of re-election for good), or risking the spread into a wider population (and crippling the economy in another way).
The World Health Organization is important, but it is only an advisory body - it has no authority to influence policy or implement operational changes in health care delivery. As a result, government from countries (China and others) to local (Ontario and others) have become holes in a global system, purely due to their own short-sightedness. These holes threaten world health these days.
Further, there are entire regions where health care is inadequate simply because of economic poverty. Wealthy countries find it convenient to ignore the conditions in places like these, but it should be clear by now that those conditions can cost the wealthy countries billions or trillions of dollars of their own wealth due to the spread of diseases which are controllable. SARS (limited to countries with fairly well-developed health care systems) was a few pennies compared to the economic costs of AIDS (originating in countries with crumbling hospitals able to care for only a handful of their populations, most of whom never see a hospital in their entire lives).
Obviously, it's in everyo