Sars is not under control in Canada
Posted on 04/23/2003 10:15:42 AM PDT by Dog Gone
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Sars is not under control in Canada
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So far, more than 4,000 people worldwide have fallen ill with Sars, which kills in 4% of cases.
In Canada, more than 300 are either "probable" or "suspected" of having sars, and 15 are reported to have died.
The outbreak centres around the city of Toronto.
The World Health Organization says it is reasonably certain that Sars is caused by infection with a new strain of coronavirus.
However, Canadian scientists have carried out hundreds of tests on samples from patients with suspected or probable cases of Sars in Canada.
They found only 40% of people carried the new strain of coronavirus.
In addition they found evidence of the strain in healthy people enlisted as "controls" for the experiment.
Nine out of ten
The results, from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, completely contradict those from scientists in Hong Kong, where more than 100 people have so far died from the illness.
 The Coronavirus: Does it cause Sars?
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Researchers around the world are scrambling to provide diagnostic tests and treatments, and even working towards vaccines, on the basis that coronavirus is the root cause.
If it is not actually caused by coronavirus, then these efforts would be in vain.
Many experts believe it will be some years before an effective vaccine for this new strain of coronavirus is available.
Dr Frank Plummer, who led the Canadian research, said: "There remain some very puzzling things we are finding.
"I'm still not convinced it's coronavirus - although it could well be, but the data is not conclusive."
I read somewhere today that the kill rate is actually up to 5.9%. Yikes.
They found only 40% of people carried the new strain of coronavirus.
By coincidence, about 40% of the total "cases" in Canada are listed as probable. So many of those who tested negative may not be SARS cases at all. Others may be at too early a stage for the virus to be detected.
In addition they found evidence of the strain in healthy people enlisted as "controls" for the experiment.
I wish we had more info on the number and identity of who these "controls' were and when the samples were taken.
But I don't know what to make of the fact that the coronavirus everyone believes responsible is not present in 60% of the Canadian patients.
Either the virus isn't responsible for SARS, or it can vanish without a trace.
Obviously, the Hong Kong studies and the Canadian studies need to be reconciled.
My guess is that this will actually spread SARS very quickly in that country, and we'll hear reports of that in about two weeks.
How reliable the information will be is still a question, but if SARS is the menace it appears to be, China is likely to be the hardest hit, at least initially.
I sure hope the coronavirus is the real and sole culprit. When the Dutch scientists injected it into monkeys, it caused SARS, and that seemed pretty definitive to me.
An empirical regularity in the epidemiology literature is that the spread of infectious epidemics in the population tends to follow a logistic pattern.Variants/mutants of a particular virus would probably start this 3-step process over again each time ...
- In the first stage, the rate of contagion is low and thus, the number of infected individuals remains relatively stable.
- The second stage occurs when a critical number of individuals become infected so that once this threshold point is reached, the rate of infection accelerates rapidly and consequently, the number of infected cases increases dramatically.
In particular, Geoffard and Philipson (1995) explain that “the larger the fraction of infected people in the population, the larger the fraction of uninfected people who will become infected in the next period, since the probability that a susceptible individual will meet an infected individual increases”.
- In the third stage, the rate of infection will slow down and thus, the number of infected cases will stabilize, as epidemics tend to display a self-correcting character for the rising risk of infection causes potential victims to take self-protective measures (Philipson and Posner, 1996).
Depending on, among other factors, the rate of growth of the population and new medical advances, infectious epidemics may become endemic or eventually die out.
I have alluded to the 'self-correcting character' as the 'potential victims ... take self-protective measures' and a reduction in cases is seen in previous posts I've made - but this was the first time I had actually seen that component/that factor in print.
Plummer did admit it's possible they are looking in the "wrong place" for virus samples, which they collect from the nasopharynx, the area of the upper throat that lies behind the nose. "(But then that) would be odd because it's thought to be transmitted through the respiratory route," he said.
My suggestion: shut down the Canadian border and stop all flights from Asia.
In the New World Order, we either react fast or die.
There's no question that health officials have taken extraordinary measures to alert people and contain the disease. They're certainly trying to get it into Stage 3 right away.
And they're having some success as we can see in Hong Kong. Even Toronto is quarantining thousands of people. But this illness is apparently extremely contagious which is obvious by the number of health care workers who have become infected even when taking precautions.
We've never seen anything like this in terms of a world reaction to a new illness.
I hadn't seen that. I wouldn't want to be the poor soldier who's asking everyone if they're sick.
From:Avian Influenza Virus in Humans in Hong Kong
In May 1997, a 3-year-old boy in Hong Kong contracted an influenzalike illness, was treated with salicylates, and died 12 days later with complications consistent with Reye syndrome.Laboratory diagnosis included the isolation in cell culture of a virus that was identified locally as influenza type A but could not be further characterized with reagents distributed for diagnosis of human influenza viruses. By August, further investigation with serologic and molecular techniques in the Netherlands (9, 20, 21) and in the United States (22) had confirmed that the isolate was A/Hong Kong/156/97 (H5N1), which was very closely related to isolate A/Chicken/Hong Kong/258/97 (H5N1).
The latter virus was considered representative of those responsible for severe outbreaks of disease on three rural chicken farms in Hong Kong during March 1997, during which several thousand chickens had died. Molecular analysis of the viral hemagglutinins showed a proteolytic cleavage site of the type found in highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses.
Because no further cases of human infection with H5 viruses were seen in Hong Kong during the summer, the case in May was considered an isolated incident, with little or no person-to-person spread. However, surveillance for influenza was increased, and local capability was established to test for H5 subtype among human patients.
As summarized on their Internet disease surveillance site, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Department of Health (http://www.info.gov.hk/dh/diseases/flu_1997.htm) detected new cases of human illness caused by H5 virus during November 1997.
By late December, the total number of confirmed new cases had climbed to 17, of which 5 were fatal (one in a 13-year-old child and four in adults, 25, 34, 54, and 60 years of age). Including the fatal index case in May, the case-fatality rates were 18% in children and 57% in adults older than 17 years.
Investigation of the circumstances surrounding each case was undertaken by the local authorities with assistance from the World Health Organization Collaborating Centers in the United States and Japan. Except for one doubtful unconfirmed case, all illnesses or laboratory evidence of infection was in patients who had been near live chickens (e.g., in market places) in the days before onset of illness, which suggests direct transmission of virus from chicken to human rather than person-to-person spread.
On December 28, 1997, veterinary authorities began to slaughter all (1.6 million) chickens present in wholesale facilities or vendors within Hong Kong, and importation of chickens from neighboring areas was stopped. Subsequently, no more human cases caused by avian influenza virus were detected. Because these cases occurred at the beginning of the usual influenza season in Hong Kong, public health officials were concerned that human strains might cocirculate with the avian influenza to generate human and avian reassortant viruses with capacity for efficient person-to-person spread.
"The Next Influenza Pandemic: Lessons from Hong Kong, 1997 "
Eerie, huh?
From the information you posted, it was actually a much more potentially serious situation than I realized. It makes you wonder whether the Chinese could have done something similar last fall in the early outbreaks which they covered up.
It's actually higher than that, because their calculation is flawed. They're dividing deaths by known cases which gives too low a figure because some of those "known cases" are going to be "deaths." Especially when an epidemic is starting, this calculation will yield really low numbers.
What they should be calculating instead is (deaths) / (deaths + recoveries), and multiply by 100 to get percent. One critic of the WHO's calculation ran the numbers and got 15 - 20%, depending on locale.
I believe that is what happened in Europe during the Bubonic Plague times. The disease came in with rats on ships from Asia (starting in Genoa, Italy). The people in big cities got sick, folks panicked, and many people fled to the countryside, or to "clean" cities that had no disease. The plague spread very quickly and millions died.
Quarantine would not work magic, but it would be better than having everyone run away from the danger zone.
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