Posted on 04/22/2003 3:59:08 PM PDT by Dog Gone
TORONTO - Canada is going the whole hog to fight Sars: Hospital staff in Toronto will now be double-gloved and wear full face shields. There have been growing concerns that the gear used so far has not been enough to protect health-care workers from Sars, Canada's national daily, The Globe and Mail reported.
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Now, they will don masks covering the mouth and nose as well as protective goggles when they enter Sars units.
They will also wear their masks along with shields covering the entire face.
They will also be urged to take more breaks and work shorter shifts to avoid mistakes that could lead to exposure.
The hospital rooms of Sars patients will be disinfected more frequently.
'Last week at this time, I thought we wiped it out from the hospital sector and we were just focusing our concerns on the community,' said Dr Sheela Basrur, Toronto's medical officer of health.
'This weekend, it's been almost a reverse. The community sparks have died down somewhat and, in fact, we have seen a resurgence in hospitals.'
The stepped-up measures were taken after two incidents unnerved health-care authorities.
During the weekend, a nurse in her 30s, unaware of her Sars infection, rode a commuter train.
A health-care professional with Sars symptoms also attended a funeral over the weekend - potentially exposing hundreds of others to the virus.
The man, whose name officials did not disclose, acted irresponsibly, Dr Hanif Kassam, medical officer of health for the region of York, just north of Toronto, told a news conference.
'My staff made me aware late (on Sunday) night that this individual was obnoxious, was threatening. He was belligerent. I find that highly inappropriate,' Reuters reported Dr Kassam as saying.
In Ontario, there are 66 health-care workers listed as probable or suspected Sars cases. That is a quarter of the province's 259 cases.
As the fight against Sars hit new setbacks, a bit of good news emerged.
No one else has been exposed to Sars in a Toronto condominium building, since three people in the building with no known links to each other came down with the disease.
And three schools that were temporarily closed have no documented cases of transmission among students or staff.
But in Toronto - the epicentre of Canada's outbreak - elective-surgery patients were being told to wait.
One man who was supposed to have heart-bypass surgery at a hospital in the first week of April has since died.
His surgery was postponed and he passed away a week or so later.
'This was a preventable death,' a doctor said.
IN HIS latest column, Tom Friedman of the New York Times writes that three bubbles burst at the beginning of the 21st century: the stock market bubble, the corporate ethics bubble and the terrorism bubble. The third bubble, which he says began to build in the 1990s, was the product of 'a kind of temporary insanity', in which basic social norms were ignored and excessive behaviour was justified by new theories about terrorist motivations. Will Sars prove a new bubble in the making? There are signs that it could. The severe acute respiratory syndrome could throw society into a severe and acute seizure of insanity, if we don't watch ourselves now. In Singapore, shaking hands, once second nature, has become a fraught decision. There are few places left which you can enter without having your temperature taken. People who are healthy cast sharply assessing eyes at anyone coming near them, for fear the latter carry the virus. Last year a handful of Muslims arrested for terrorism prompted suspicion towards all Muslims. This year, a handful of Singaporeans identified as super-spreaders of the disease is breeding suspicion towards all Singaporeans. Internationally, the same keen anxieties and fears. So far China, Hongkong, and to a lesser extent Singapore, bear the brunt of them. Travel is down; firms that have factories or dealings with China have postponed or cancelled trips there. Some even decline China contracts outright, though the virus can be found in their home countries too. Australia, latent isolationism rearing its head, for a while urged its people to stay home instead of travelling overseas. Some Australian companies have recalled their expatriate staff in Hongkong. In America, the Asian Wall Street Journal reports, people are even eschewing made-in-China furniture for fear a few stray viruses might be nesting in their sofas or dining chairs. Social psychology tells us that even ordinarily calm and thoughtful individuals can go into a frenzy when they are in a bigger group. When the driving force is a fear of the unknown, the frenzy deepens. The fact that China is the so-called Ground Zero of the Sars outbreak probably adds to the international frenzy. Memories of 'yellow peril' lurk in the western consciousness still. But just as yellow peril proved a false fear, the current international paranoia towards Sars could also prove overblown, a temporary abnormality that time and experience will cure. There are several reasons for thinking this way. The first is that the Ground Zero of Sars is moving rapidly to restore confidence in itself. Driven by a realisation that continued cover-ups and inaction will cost it dearly in terms of prestige and economic growth, the Chinese government has sacked two top officials and taken decisive steps to open its Sars books to the World Health Organisation. It is also moving swiftly to curb the spread of the disease, such as by closing campuses and suspending school classes the way Hongkong and Singapore have done. This is not to say that Sars will be contained any time soon - medical experts say that the disease has spread to too many countries now for it to be stamped out totally. But acknowledging that the battle exists is half the battle won, and while it is a test of patience, it is a matter of time before the disease is brought under control. Indeed, epidemiologically speaking, that is the inevitable outcome. Cold comfort it may be, but viruses are parasitical by definition, and will mutate towards an eventual existential equilibrium in their hosts. Businessmen, on their part, are adaptive creatures, the survivors of the human species. They make contingency plans, but it is still the bottom line that counts most. In Guangdong, for instance, it's still business as usual at factories owned by the multinationals. Worker absenteeism, The Economist reports, is not a problem. A friend working in Shanghai sent me an e-mail, quoting someone else saying: 'In the United States, 10 people die every week from atypical pneumonia of types which are not Sars, 850 die every week from car accidents, 700 die from gun shot wounds. Last year, 1 1/2 million people got tuberculosis in China, and 15 per cent died. The background risks are far higher than the Sars risk. So life continues. What's the big deal?' I don't know about the accuracy of the figures, but you get the picture. Humankind has survived innumerable outbreaks of disease and the emergence of new viruses. When the HIV virus first made the headlines, for instance, people avoided homosexuals and would not share dining tables, far less utensils, with them, irrational as this was. Only when it became clear that the virus spread only through body fluids did the fears subside. What is needed now as the antidote to widespread irrational fear about Sars is information: how the virus spreads, under what conditions it thrives, and what the chances of recovery are. Extinguish fear of the unknown by making the unknown known. In the battle against terrorism, governments everywhere work on the 'need to know' principle. What you don't know won't kill you. In the battle against an unseen virus however, 'need to know' has to go out of the window. What you don't know could very well kill you. Officials thus need to share information, quickly and comprehensively, with the people under their care. The individual needs to be given information for two reasons: one, so that he can curb irrational fears, and two, so that he can take the necessary precautions - without being paranoid about them. Unlike the battle against terrorism, it's the individual, not the authorities, who holds the key in curbing the spread of Sars. And preventing the bubble of fear from growing begins with the individual too.
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