SARS? Risk may be low
 

From an article in the SJ Mercury News:<BR>http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/

Oh? Newspapers are now medical experts? How reassuring. Do you mind if I wait for the Center for Disease Control to make a more formal pronouncement?<BR><BR>Like any disease that has no known cure, how do you stop it from spreading unless you stop the carriers of the disease from circulating?<BR><BR>If the USA escapes a major outbreak it will be because our medical authorities took action. I think I heard the same thing about AIDs when it first originated in Africa. It was a disease that was &quot;over there&quot; and &quot;civilized&quot; nations had little to fear because it was a disease associated with poverty.<BR><BR>I don't think this disease is going away soon. And we cannot hide from it because we are the USA. It is no respecter of persons, places, pedigree, or regimes. <BR><BR>It is contagious, and it will spread if people who have it roam the globe.<BR>

Bob, did you even look at the article? It includes opinions from the CDC, as well as a Stanford professor who is the editor of Infectious Disease Alert, the director of the National Center for Infectious Disease Control, and a professor of infectious diseases at Baylor.<BR><BR>Since most of us do not haev a direct hotline from the CDC we rely on responsible press reporting to keep up to date, and Betsy was just pointing ot one good resource....

Bob's memory of the early days of AIDS is diffrent from mine. I remember our awareness of it beginning with gay populations in NYC and San Francisco. Wasn't it originally referred to as the gay plague, before being traced to Haiti and then to Africa? And the first symptoms were high rates of Kaposi's sarcoma and rare types of pneumonia? True, NOW many if not most cases are based in Africa, and that's where it probably originated, but medically it was first recognized and named in the good ol' US of A.

I found this perspective refreshing:<BR><BR>SARS, for now, is far less prevalent in the United States than many other contagious diseases that health experts track. As of Monday, there had been 141 cases of SARS in the United States since March 19, no deaths and only one person sick enough to need a ventilator. By comparison, last week there were 344 new cases of hepatitis (which killed 5,094 Americans in 2001), 162 cases of syphilis and 5,780 cases of gonorrhea. Last week alone, pneumonia and influenza killed 890 Americans, according to the CDC.<BR>