Passengers Held after Reports of SARS symptoms

San Jose, CA 122 have been cleared take connecting flights or go home according to AMR spokesman. I agree with the isolation of these patients. This is in the interest of Public Health. Precedence in history is with TB.

The airlines have already lost 24% of passengers since 9/11.

http://www.thestreet.com/_tsclsii/markets/marketfeatures/10077727.html

 

Could SARS circle the globe? Could it be the next global influenza catastrophe? From what I've heard there is no effective treatment against it, and it kills indiscriminately, young and old, healthy and sick.

 

SARS is nasty, with about 3-4 percent who get it dying. If this became a global epidemic 10s of millions could die (worst case obviously). So far WHO and the CDC have done a good job of keeping tabs on it. I hope it doesn't spread and they figure out what it is.

D

 

It gets worse. I read that no one who has contracted it has fully recovered. They keep having relapses. This thing is nasty.

 

12 monkeys

 

I pray that the CDC & WHO find the cause and cure. Hopefully they can have an effective vaccine soon. Anyone here think there could be a link to terrorism or that the virus was under study by a scientist and an accident occurred?

 

Even without terrorism or bio-engineering, scientists have been predicting a "superbug" for a while. The problem is high density and mobility of population, and increasing resistance to antibiotics/medication. And keep in mind this SARS is not a superbug. A true superbug would be even more contagious and have higher fatality rate.

 

Why does everyone expect everything bad to be terrorist-related? Why would a terrorist create a new bug when there's plenty of much more effective pre-existing ones around? The accident theory is possible but more likely it's just a random mutation that happens to infective and viable. It happens in influenza all the time and South-East Asia is where most of the mutations seem to occur. It looks like this is a Corona virus - related to the common cold virus.

It is worth remembering that a lot more people die every year of malaria and we spend next to nothing trying to cure that.

 

I agree. Everything that happens that's remotely bad today is at least given the question of "could it be a terrorist?" Like some "terrorist", a dirt poor wannabe suicide bomber is going to decide to study advanced medicine for eight years instead and genetically engineer a superbug that only kills 3% of its victims as his life's work.

The Onion did a great parody of this where the headline said that a store fire was deemed not to be a terror attack after the Dept. of Fatherland Security gave the OK.

We live in a culture of fear, isolation and violence.

 

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."