X-Message-Number: 21552 Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 13:08:22 -0400 Subject: SARS not stoppable From: Thomas R Mazanec <> This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. ----__JNP_000_53be.26d6.37d8 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=--__JNP_000_73ac.7de7.3850 This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. ----__JNP_000_73ac.7de7.3850 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Many experts believe spread of SARS inevitable 04/06/03 Daniel Q. Haney Associated Press Can severe acute respiratory syndrome be stopped? As hard as public-health officials work to stamp out the virus, many experts reluctantly conclude it is likely if not inevitable that it eventually will spread everywhere. From Our Advertisers The highly contagious disease has killed at least 90 people and sickened more than 2,000. New cases appear daily in Hong Kong, despite an all-out effort to isolate victims and quarantine those at risk. Experts acknowledge that the eventual course of any new disease is almost impossible to predict. Some frightening new infections have burned themselves out, while others, like AIDS, have become global disasters. There were three more deaths in Hong Kong yesterday, as hospitals in the autonomous Chinese territory struggled to cope with the growing burden. Health officials said hospitals were treating 39 new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, up from 27 new cases Friday and 26 Thursday. Three men, ages 52, 73 and 81, died yesterday of the disease. All three had other medical problems, the Hong Kong Health Department announced. Several features of SARS make epidemiologists, virologists and infectious-disease experts fear total victory is unlikely. "Will it explode into a major epidemic that will propagate over the years? Or will it fizzle out or be contained at a low rate? That's unknown," said Dr. Lee Harrison of the University of Pittsburgh. "I suspect we will see this disease for at least the next several years. It's hard to imagine it will be over soon." Perhaps the most ominous sign is the steep climb in new cases, especially in Hong Kong, which has had a nearly fourfold increase in just two weeks. Each person who gets it may spread the infection to several others before they even know they have it. Many are infected through face-to-face contact, but evidence is mounting that the virus also may spread through the air or be picked up from contaminated surfaces. On Friday, President Bush gave federal health officials the power to quarantine Americans sick with SARS, although there is no plan to use that power now. There are more than 100 suspected cases in the United States, but no one has died. Besides quarantining the sick, health officials have tried to minimize SARS' spread by urging people with suspicious symptoms not to fly on airlines. However, some experts worry that those who are clearly sick may not be the biggest concern. People catch bad colds from friends who have mild ones. The same may be true for SARS. Those who have slight symptoms or even seem perfectly well could still spread the disease. In such a scenario, isolating the sick and quarantining their contacts will not work. "We may be able to slow transmission, but we won't be able to stop it if there are many other cases of milder disease out there," said Dr. Arnold Monto, a University of Michigan epidemiologist. The cause of the outbreak has not been proven beyond doubt, but investigators say most evidence points to a previously unknown version of the coronavirus, the bug that causes about a third of all colds. Some who study this family of viruses say that because it spreads through coughs and sneezes, they cannot imagine totally wiping it out now that it has infected so many people. Some suggest that even if this outbreak subsides, the virus could pop up again with no warning or it might follow a seasonal pattern, like colds and flu. Just how it acts in the long run will depend on its genetic makeup and origins. Birds and other animals have their own versions of coronavirus, and some of them cause much worse disease than the human type. Researchers say SARS may be caused by a coronavirus that moved from animals to people. Perhaps it is a standard human coronavirus that picked up menacing genes from an animal version of the virus. Such leaps have happened in the recent past. The hendra virus spread from horses to people in Australia, while the nipah virus went from pigs to humans in Malaysia. However, neither bug then spread from person to person. The New York Times contributed to this story. 2003 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission. ----__JNP_000_73ac.7de7.3850 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21552