NOT TO BE SNEEZED AT!

The possible pandemic proportions of the SARS virus – an acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – has already had repercussions in several countries. Especially throughout Asia.

In Hong Kong Chinese authorities have announced setting up two more quarantine camps after already isolating more than 200 residents from a housing estate in Kowloon.

Already 16 people have died in Hong Kong and more than 600 others have been infected since the deadly pneumonia strain first surfaced in the former British colony last March.

At least sixty people have died since SARS was first diagnosed in Guandong province in China where it thought the disease first occurred in animals and then mutated to affect humans.

Closer to home a Queensland schoolboy rugby team and their teachers will be banned from school for ten days when they get back from playing in Hong Kong.

So far none show signs of illness but a 21-year-old Queensland man who returned from Hong Kong on Monday is showing signs of the illness.

The fears of SARS are seriously affecting travel plans. The floating luxury apartment ship, The World, has postponed its scheduled trip to China and Vietnam. Instead it will spend three more weeks in Australian waters.

And, after approaches by the Drive programme, passengers on Star cruises will be able to postpone Asian trips without penalty as long as they book again by September. And Qantas has announced a similar no penalty postponement policy.

But some gloomier news. A Sydney professor says SARS is probably a monster of man’s own making like Ebola and AIDS.

Professor Peter Curson, an epidemiologist, says people are wrong to believe that antibiotics are a “magic bullet” because disease agents change and modify and mutate.

In fact, antibiotics have created resistant infections,

One of the reasons why? Curson says the world got smug by writing off all infectious diseases after the eradication of smallpox in 1979.

And, according to the professor, we are going to see a lot more exotic infections as people “ tamper with the environment”.

Interesting, even scary, stuff.

Wednesday, April 2, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002