SARS may strike U.S. next year

BRUSSELS, Belgium, May 20 � The SARS virus likely will reappear in the United States and Europe next flu season and cause some deaths, the U.S. health and human services secretary said Tuesday....

www.msnbc.com...

This is not going away, and is going to get worse before it gets better.

If it does it will certainly only cause a minute percentage of the fatalities that "ordinary" flu causes each year in the US.
This is not the Eve of Destruction.

And that would be as true of Britain and a great many of these "ordinary" flu deaths could be prevented not by some breakthrough in virology, biochemistry or pharmacology but simply by spending more money (state or families) on looking after the old.
Poverty and the indifference of those wealthier will always kill more than any virus about to mutate into the next Media-Drivel-Plague.

The "Black" Death wouldn't be pc nowadays, of course - one wonders what they'll call that if it reappears?

Originally posted by Estragon
And that would be as true of Britain and a great many of these "ordinary" flu deaths could be prevented not by some breakthrough in virology, biochemistry or pharmacology but simply by spending more money (state or families) on looking after the old.
Poverty and the indifference of those wealthier will always kill more than any virus about to mutate into the next Media-Drivel-Plague.

Agreed.

SARS, the Great Bugbear is coming under control, exactly as the less hysterical voices said would happen. It's a penumonia, and it's not easily transmitted but the media always hops on new diseases and shrieks about them as though it's the end of the world.

Remember the last end-of-the-world virus? That was the West Nile Virus. And the one before that? That would have been the super-flu of 2-3 years ago.

We will always have global epidemics with us. But our fear is more dangerous than the epidemics themselves.

I notice that people have stopped reporting about new SARS cases -- in case everyone's forgotten, the link is here:
www.who.int...

The number of new cases continues to decline as quarrantine and other methods work. I do expect to see the occasional spike, but anticipate that it will go the way of other diseases and become a background problem with fewer than 3,000 cases next year and an equally low number of deaths.

Excellently voiced, my dear Byrd: and the link is the one I most rely upon day-to-day (and it's bureaucratically day-to-day where Estragon is.)
"epidemics" -that has a technical meaning: who knows it? - are "global" because of aeroplanes!
We are mortal, cyber-chums. Something's gonna get you and for nearly everyone on ATS, it won't be before the Biblical three-score-and-ten.
The real health issues are those I alluded to: millions of children dying of diarrhoea because saline-and-sugar isn't there. Old people dying of hypothermia because no one gives a d*mn.
Step back and look.