We're Safe From the Latest SARS-Like Disease...For the Moment

KentuckyFC writes "Back in 2002, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS killed about 10 per cent of the 8,000 people it infected in southern China and Hong Kong. The severity of the disease and its high death rate triggered panic in many countries where health agencies worked feverishly to prevent its further spread, largely successfully. Then in September 2012, a virologist working in Saudi Arabia noticed a similar virus in a patient suffering from acute pneumonia and renal failure. Since then, so-called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS has also begun to spread. The World Health Organization says it knows of 63 deaths from only 149 cases, a death rate that seems to dwarf that of SARS. So how worried should we be? Now epidemiologists who have modeled how the disease spreads have some reassuring news. They say MERS is unlikely to cause a global pandemic. But with Saudi Arabia expecting the imminent arrival of millions of pilgrims for the 2013 Hajj, there are still good reasons to be concerned."

Comments

I remember sars

[AlphaWolf_HK]

That disease everybody was so panicked over because you had only a 97% chance of survival.

Re:I remember sars

[vux984]

3% mortality is horrific; if 20% (typical "bad" flu infection rate) of the USA population got the disease, and 97% survived... that would still be 1.8million corpses in the USA alone.

That's more dead American's in one go than all American casualties of war since (and including) the revolution.

World War I & II, the Civil War, the Revolution, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the little ones combined is only 1.3M dead, (with another 1.5M wounded).

1.8M dead is pretty horrific.

Yes, its not civilization crushing levels of horrific like a new black plague would be, but it's still pretty horrifying.

Re:I remember sars

[vux984]

A lot of people die every year, and flu death are not random. The people most likely to die anyway are the typical fatalities. I'm not saying everything is hunky dory, but just cranking out the raw numbers distorts the story.

Sure, any disease culls the weak and sick first. But a typical bad flu season is less than 50,000. So if we subtract that number out of the 1.8 million... well... its still 1.8 million since that figure wasn't precise enough to meaningfully subtract ~50,000 from it.

Pet camels

[dgatwood]

From the article:

Indeed, virologists announced earlier this week that a camel owned by a victim of MERS also had the disease, the first evidence of this kind of transmission so far. So if you don’t own a pet camel, you’re probably safe.

Sorry, Drommy. Guess I'm gonna have to put you down.

2013 Hajj? That's long gone

[gordo3000]

the Hajj finished almost a month ago, is the summary implying a >1 month gestation for the virus or are we just horribly out of date?

Re:Can you smell my sarcasm or should I spell it o

[ChromaticDragon]

Not sure how this actually affects the statistics these days...

But HOW it causes discrepancies is incredibly straightforward.

The issue is not counting lives at all if they don't reach a particular point. If country A and B have identical birth rates and identical death rates (not just rates - the full blown distributions of such, etc.) but country A counts lives from birth and country B starts lives from 3 weeks after birth, this means country B has completely removed from consideration every infant that died prior to age 3 weeks. You can imagine this would lead to different "life expectancies".

Indeed, this works in different ways. This is one reason the ancient world had life expectancies that were really low and yet had quite a few old geezers around. The fact was that it was HARD to live to ten. But for those who did, living as long as fold do today wasn't so strange.

Re:I dont kiss camels very often

[rubycodez]

there were night vision youtube videos taken by some of our soldiers, let's just say arabs weren't kissing their camels or giving them any other kind of foreplay

Are SARS statistics really true?

[jasax]

By chance, a few weeks ago I saw a documentary about SARS in China.

Remember that the 2008 Olympics were to be in Beijing, and so Chinese authorities in 2002 tried everything to avoid inflicting any tiny bit of fear in the tourists coming to China. They tried at first to admit there was an epidemics, and along the way declared many SARS fatalities as due to other causes. The things become more transparent (i.e. the official numbers were more realistic) when the medical community all over the country began to put a strong pressure. Many doctors were victims because when SARS started the hospitals didn't have equipment to protect them conveniently. But today no one really can tell the "true" number of SARS victims (and also of infected people) in China, and that biases the global SARS statistics, of course.

But the documentary was not about the deaths: it was about the survivors that have been treated in hospitals. In fact, the standard treatment was to deploy huge amounts of cortisone in the infected and that, AFAIR, stops blood flow in bones (among other secondary effects) and so many bone parts died in the patients in the forthcoming months and years. Some people have already gone into surgery many times (up to a dozen or so, in some cases) to patch those dead bones and other injuries in joints, many are in wheelchairs and in some cases they are sorts of abandoned by family and authorities. Some have already died, or even committed suicide.

It was said that the "cortisone" treatment was in China only, other countries (such as Canada, which had a bunch of deaths) didn't follow those medical guidelines.

Couldn't google the documentary name but just found an article about the issue: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/07/content_9276884.htm

Final words: many survivors are still severely crippled from SARS. For them the SARS epidemics didn't end in a few months. And local medical practices still make a strong impact in the quality of life of the patients.