An excerpt from
this article . Warning: contains conspiracy theory.
"Mysterious" in modern medicine usually means we haven't yet quite identified the cause, although we have now done so here. What's been officially named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is one or more strains of coronavirus, commonly associated with colds. "Killer pneumonia" is practically a redundancy, since so many types of pneumonia (there are more than 50) do kill.
The real questions are: How lethal, how transmissible, and how treatable is this strain? And the answers leave no grounds for excitement, much less panic.
Super?
At this writing, SARS appears to have killed 54 people out of almost 1,400 afflicted according to the World Health Organization, a death rate of less than 4%. But since this only takes into account those ill enough to seek medical help, the actual ratio of deaths to infections is certainly far less. [This is a tremendous understatement.]
In contrast, the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed approximately a third of the 60 million afflicted.
Further, virtually all of the deaths have been in countries with horrendous medical care, primarily mainland China. In this country, three people have died out of 28 afflicted according to Health Canada, but that may say more about Canada's vaunted national health-care system than about SARS. In the United States, 40 people have been hospitalized with SARS with zero deaths.
Conversely, other forms of pneumonia kill more than 40,000 North Americans yearly.
Transmissibility?
Each year millions of North Americans alone contract the flu. Compare that with those 64 SARS cases diagnosed thus far and, well, you can't compare them. Further evidence that SARS is hard to catch is that health care workers and family members of victims are by far the most likely to become afflicted.
Treatability?
"There are few drugs and no vaccines to fight this pathogen," one wire service panted breathlessly. But there are also few drugs to fight any type of viral pneumonia, because we have very few antiviral medicines. . . . [Consider also approximately 97% of cases naturally defended themselves successfully against this plague. What did they, or their immune systems do right? Why is this rarely, if ever, mentioned or investigated by any mainstream source? Alternatively, Mr. Fumento mentions "Ribovirin," which he states, "appears to be effective against SARS."
