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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| SARS Could Kill Millions By Antonio C. Abaya April 24, 2003 It was ghoulish, as well as in awfully bad taste, of Tourism Secretary Dick Gordon to even think of marketing the Philippines as a preferred tourist destination on the basis that this country was �SARS-free.� That dubious distinction may have been valid four weeks ago, but not anymore. We now have at least one confirmed SARS death and several possible others, plus only Allah knows how many dozen infected carriers walking around sneezing and coughing the virus into our already polluted air. One wonders how many tourists, if any, Gordon was able to bag with that cheap shot. It is amazing to what lengths the tourism people bent over backwards to cadge some tourist dollars from a rapidly shrinking market. It was only last April 10 or thereabouts that ABS-CBN�s TV Patrol showed a video clip of a planeload of Chinese �tourists�, direct from heavily SARS-infected southern China, disembarking at Laoag International Airport without face masks, without temperature checks, without being quarantined � they were only required to fill up a questionnaire which most of them probably could not even read and understand � while a later planeload of Filipino balikbayans from relatively SARS-free Taiwan had to undergo stringent quarantine procedures. (Chinese �tourists� from southern China? More likely minders, checkers and accountants of smuggling and drug trafficking syndicates come to check on their local operations in Northern Luzon, long a suspected center for such �globalization� activities.) ***** According to the WHO, SARS has been spreading worldwide at the rate of about 22% a week, in both deaths and infected victims. That means it doubles about every month. If the rate remains steady, the 250 recorded deaths and 4,300 recorded infections as of this week could be 500 and 8,600 by May 24, and could reach 64,000 and 1.1 million, respectively, by Christmas of 2003. If medical science is unable to develop an effective vaccine in time and SARS rages on at its present rate of 22%, there could be 4.096 million deaths and 70.4 million infections worldwide by June 2004. Figure out for yourself what the numbers would be by Christmas 2004. I did the arithmetic and the numbers are too gruesome to reveal in public. SARS is potentially more lethal than the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, which killed some 20 million people, including half a million Americans. The bubonic plague, or Black Death, which ravaged Europe from 1348 to 1350, killed an estimated 25 million people, or about half the estimated population of the continent then. Ironically, the social conditions in the 21st century have made mankind more vulnerable to the spread of sudden, unexpected outbreaks of epidemics and pandemics, despite monumental advances in medical science and hygiene. More people live in tightly packed urban communities than ever before. More people commute to work or school in tightly packed public conveyances than ever before. More people routinely travel to other places and other countries in tightly packed transport vehicles than ever before. At present, China is bearing the brunt of the SARS epidemic. But if it spreads to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with their squalid slums and relatively weak public health facilities, the death and infection tolls could rise dramatically. Think of the effect on sub-Sahara Africa, already ravaged by AIDS, malaria and famine. Neither the influenza virus of 1918-1919 nor the yersenis pestis of the bubonic bacteria in the 14th century was defeated by medical science at the time that they raged. Both just somehow burned themselves out and their antidotes or cures were not developed until decades or even centuries after the diseases had decimated millions of people. There is almost no excuse for this to happen in the 21st century, There are now medical research facilities and hundreds of medical scientists of the first quality in dozens of countries around the world. If they were given even only a tiny fraction of the $80-$100 billion that the Americans spent to flatten Iraq, there is no reason why a vaccine for SARS cannot be found and found soon. Canadian scientists have unraveled the genetic sequencing of the SARS virus. That means they already have its DNA molecular profile. Comparing it to the DNA of the ordinary corona virus or common cold virus, which it is said to be a variation of, they must already know where the two viruses differ, in the same way that geneticists would know from their DNA where a pair of non-identical twins would differ. This at least provides medical researchers with a focus in their scrutiny of the SARS virus. The problem seems to be that it is mutating as it spreads. But there are only a finite number of mutations that the virus can possibly mutate into. With the aid of computers, it is possible to anticipate all possible mutations and possibly block those mutations even before they happen. ***** This article appears in the May 3, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press magazine. |
| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to "SARS Could Kill Millions" I DON�T� KNOW how your emails have been getting into my mailbox. But I abhor this act of spamming, let alone your negative thoughts on almost everything under the sun. The Philippines Free Press should be ashamed of itself. > This article appears in the May 3, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press > magazine and will be archived in the website www.tapatt.org. [email protected] April 29, 2003 �������������������������� TALK ABOUT population control. Still the world population will go on increasing. Wars, pestilence, murder and mayhem, and natural calamities cannot outpace the production of babies. Gras Reyes [email protected] ���������������������������� There's cancer, AIDS, and now SARS. If we anthropomorphize the planet, we can almost say that Gaia is fighting back and culling humans the only way she knows. It's brutal but if we can't police our numbers ourselves then our "parent" might as well do it for us. (That assumes that the epidemic was naturally spawned. There is a possibility that it was accidentally caused through human carelessness at a Chinese Army bio/chem. warfare laboratory facility somewhere in Guangdong Province where SARS is said to have originated. In the 1970s, just such an accident caused an outbreak of anthrax disease from a bio/chem. warfare lab in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals, where several dozens of people died as a result. ACA) > This at least provides medical researchers with a focus in their > scrutiny of the SARS virus. The problem seems to be that it is mutating > as it spreads. But there are only a finite number of mutations that the > virus can possibly mutate into. With the aid of computers, it is > possible to anticipate all possible mutations and possibly block those > mutations even before they happen. In an April 16 article Robert Walgate writes: "[CDC director Julie] Gerberding did not believe the virus was mutating in Hong Kong, where some doctors claim the virus is becoming slightly more virulent, with worse cases and the first deaths of young people. Nevertheless, she added 'this is a single-stranded RNA virus, and that kind of virus, as it reproduces itself, doesn't have the zipper on the other side to match up perfectly, so it makes mistakes. The HIV virus is an RNA virus that does that too. And so it is not surprising that we see new strains emerge over time. We haven't documented that yet with this virus, and I think the fact that the sequenced data from the isolate characterized in Canada and the US are so close, suggests that large mutations are not occurring. But it's biologically plausible, and we'll be keeping our eye on these strains as we go forward.'" (http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030416/04) (That is one expert�s opinion. Another expert, Dr. Robert Webster, chief virologist at St. Jude�s Children Research in Memphis, Tenn., was quoted by Time (April 27): �when a virus comes across to a new host, what does a virus do? It varies like crazy.� ACA) What I find troubling are reports that some people have begun to become paranoid and are treating the afflicted as olden folks did those who had leprosy. Brings back memories of the time in the late 20th century when people automatically recoiled from anyone who had AIDS. Those with SARS have now become literally untouchables. Edwardson Tan [email protected] OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO . |