US hits panic button on mystery virus

TIMES NEWS NETWORK [India] ^ | SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 2003 09:18:29 PM | CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

[Jim Noble]

>>US and Canadian authorities have said they will now detain and screen people coming from the China and South East Asian countries who show any sign of sickness or symptoms of the disease.<<

And they're giving out dandy little cards.

This is not "hitting the panic button".

Obviously we want to refuse entry to people who are sick with SARS arriving from Asia. But the key is refusing entry to those who are in the ten day incubation period but who aren't sick yet.

If we do this tomorrow, then we can arrest SARS outside of the country, in Asia and Canada.

If we don't, the vast majority of SARS-infected people (who aren't sick yet) will be free to travel here, as any sensible exposed person would most certainly do.

The international airports of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and Vietnam should be closed immediately. In the event that this does not occur, US airports should not allow flights from those areas to land in the US. Any persons arriving from those areas must be quarantined for ten days prior to being released to travel in the US.

[realpatriot]

SARSOnline may help with questions you may have.

[Revel]

condidering that it takes as long as 10 days for symptoms to appear then this is almost worthless. All travel to and from any country with an outbreak of this disease should be imediately prohibited. Saddly people are more worried about the economic problems this may bring. It will have to become like the plague before such measures will be enacted. This is the price you pay for World Globalism.

[realpatriot]

Good point, thanks!

[Pedrobud]

Unfortuantely, I beleive you are correct. This probably was engineered/ This could be catastrophic. Scary

[Paleo Conservative]

To: I don't think the Spanish Flu ever eclipsed the Great War in the newspapers of the time.

But it did in the death toll.

[Dog Gone]

At the rate you state, the Iraq War may not be the headline story. Do you think that is possible?

It's certainly possible. What we don't know about this virus could fill volumes.

A lot of "hot" epidemics burn themselves out fairly quickly. Otherwise, we'd probably all be dead of ebola by now. That may be the case with this.

But the evidence is contradictory, and the government reactions are contradictory. I don't think we know, and I don't think they know, either.

What I'd like to know is whether anyone gets well without hospitalization. There aren't 30 million hospital beds in this country.

[GREY GHOSTt]

Just wait until all of the respirators are busy! This will
raise the death toll!

[VMI70]

Because of the length of time the illness runs its' course and its' serious nature, it could overwhelm our medical treatment capacity in a very short time. That makes it as good as a bioweapon.

It's like combat. It is far better to seriously wound the opposing soldier than to kill him. If he's wounded, it takes someone in the field to administer first aid, 2-4 people to get him to an ambulance or a helicopter, both of them are then in harms way. If you wound enough of the enemy, it will overwhelm the hospital resources, etc, etc.

This could be a modern day version of the 1918-19 flu epidemic. Keep a close eye on this. It has the potential to be a problem much more serious than is currently presented.

[so_real]

I'm fashioning my own tin-foil hat on this one. The timing is suspicious. The attempt of China to play this down is suspicious. The staunch resistance of a bacteria to any form of antibiotic is suspicious.

After hearing that Hussein tested chem/bios on his own people, I now believe that China would be capable of doing the same with a bio-weapon. But the fact that the kill rate is so low, the fact that it is apparently free-in-the-wild in several countries, and the fact that China apparently does not have an antigen would lead me to think that if it is indeed a bio-weapon, it was a bio-weapon in progress ... that is to say someone screwed up and it escaped before they were able to mature it into a more powerful weapon.

[MrPeanut]

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned of the seriousness of the outbreak.

"This virus is unlike any known human or animal member of the virus family," it said in a statement.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

US hits panic button on mystery virus

This is further proof that not enough people read the Bible ! Its amazing to me that such a guide for life and death can be ignored as much as it is .

[Paleo Conservative]

The staunch resistance of a bacteria to any form of antibiotic is suspicious.

It is a virus, not a bacterium. Antibiotics don't work against viruses.

[Lessismore]

All travel to and from any country with an outbreak of this disease should be imediately prohibited.

This would restrict travel to and from Canada, China, Singapore, Taiwan, United States, and Vietnam. Other countries have only a few isolated cases of travelers, and no local transmissions.

[spyone]

-- +DJ 88 More People In HK Apartment Complex Sickened By SARS --


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03-30-03 2218ET- - 10 18 PM EST 03-30-03

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[so_real]

It is a virus, not a bacterium. Antibiotics don't work against viruses.

Hmmm... My bad, last I heard they had not identified the causitive agent -- whether it was a bacteria or virus was still a question mark. I see in this article they specifically refer to it as viral.

[1st-P-In-The-Pod]

FYI I talked to some Chinese grad students today and they all had the same explanation for the SARS epidemic. The area of China the SARS started in is extremely poor. That means the gutters run with sewage, etc. Many diseases just hang out there generation after generation and mutate to stronger strains. This has been a source of red-face to the Chinese gov't, so they keep it quiet as much as they can. The citizens of the area think nothing of it, and just do the best they can. For what it's worth. Gotta go now.

[aristeides]

I don't think the identification of the organism as the coronavirus is definitively established yet. So I don't think it can be regarded as quite certain yet that it's not a bacterium that's causing this. But, if it is a bacterium, it's apparently an antibiotic-resistant one.

[honway]

http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/1/29/155648

The irony is that since 1993 I haven’t had to adduce my arguments to prove that there is an offensive bioweapons program in China: The program has figured in a United States government document, available to the public

[honway]

Does anyone know if there is any substantiation to the claim that this "bug" escaped the Chinese bioweapons program by accident?