SARS pandemonium

Wednesday May 07, 2003 16:39

by Gaillimhed

Scaring the public has historically been shown to be an effective weapon against reason and an effective means to promote enemy identification, which primates are great at doing. The 20th century offers some notable examples.

Since SARS was first reported, the World Health Organization has freely issued travel advisory warnings, and the press has had a field day covering every incremental detail of the unfolding epidemic. Fear is the name of the game. Scaring the public has historically been shown to be an effective weapon against reason and an effective means to promote enemy identification, which primates are great at doing. The 20th century offers some notable examples.
While the human tragedy of lost lives is always great, SARS's mortality figures alone cannot justify the attention. From December through April, an outbreak of Ebola tore through a remote region of the Congo, eventually infecting 135 people, of whom 123 died—a mortality rate of 91 percent. Yet this outbreak received almost no media coverage. I found out about it only because I was visiting the WHO Web site to read its announcements about, you guessed it, SARS.
Incidentally there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths. Worldwide, TB kills two million people every year. Someone in the world is newly infected with TB every second, and More than 750 people die daily of the common cold.
While SARS has made appearances in 27 countries, it has, to date, infected no more than about 5,500 people globally and less than 350 have died. Even if one takes into account the unpredictably insidious nature of an infectious disease, which can be spread between strangers who share nothing more than the same aircraft, these numbers suggest that the mass avoidance of Asian cities by global travelers—and the near-universal wearing of face masks in places like Hong Kong—is an overreaction. Although SARS can be spread by coughing, the relatively large size of the droplets in which the virus is transmitted significantly limits the distance it can travel to infect a healthy person—at least compared to an airborne disease like influenza. Most transmissions have occurred between individuals who have had prolonged close contact, such as health workers caring for infected patients or family members visiting their sick relatives. Few transmissions have been traced to airplanes and none to simply walking down the street. Your chances of visiting Hong Kong without getting infected are close to 100 percent—even if you don't take special precautions. All of which suggests that damage done by the fear of the disease may be far more dangerous than the disease itself.