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Posted on 04/26/2003 4:20:14 PM PDT by TrexDogs

TORONTO - Lord, one hates to take one's cues from the New Democrats, especially here in the pages of the national organ of the right wing, but at times like this, one must put aside one's biases for the greater good.

It was the diminutive Marilyn Churley, deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, who said it yesterday in a scrum at Queen's Park. She meant it in the partisan fashion, and was speaking of severe acute respiratory syndrome and what she considers the tepid response of the province's Tory government; I would modify the terms to focus on the bozos from the World Health Organization and the whole damned schmozzle.

What Ms. Churley said was, "We should be treating this like war. This is our war."

So be it. Splendid. War it is. I may have missed out on Iraq but by God I'm on for this one.

Thus it is that I am pleased to announce that I wish to be embedded with Don Low.

Dr. Low is the microbiologist-in-chief at Mount Sinai Hospital, ground zero here in Plague City, or one of 'em anyway. He's a scientist and a doctor, not a politician or even a high-level public official. No one owns him, and he owes no one. Free of greasy allegiances and the silences born of them, unbound even by the bargains of necessity, he yesterday seized the helm of the good ship Toronto.

He was appearing at the daily SARS briefing for reporters.

Ontario Premier Ernie Eves had just finished speaking and taking questions.

Drs. Colin D'Cunha and Jim Young, respectively the province's public health commissioner and public safety boss, had had a few words to say about the WHO travel advisory issued two days ago, and had spoken pretty frankly of their utter shock and dismay at the lack of defensible science used by the WHO in reaching the decision to blacklist Toronto.

But it was Dr. Low who let go the rocket.

Even as Mr. Eves and Drs. D'Cunha and Young were still mouthing platitudes that the WHO decision might be reversed -- and fair enough, as it is they and their federal counterparts who have to be dealing with these guys over the next days, and that is always rendered more tricky if you publicly slam them as twits -- Dr. Low sat shaking his head back and forth.

"No," he said flatly. "They're not going to change their minds. They know they're wrong, but they're not going to admit it. They'll never go back no matter how wrong they are.... We're gonna have to live with it."

He was, with Drs. D'Cunha and Young, involved in a lengthy teleconference yesterday with the WHO officials. He heard their explanations, the defensiveness in their voices, and their tone, and the one thing he is absolutely sure of, he said, was that science -- in other words, the nature and epidemiology of the Toronto SARS outbreak -- had bugger all to do with the travel advisory that is already pounding the city economy.

The WHO people had no science, Dr. Low said. They weren't aware "that we haven't had a case in the community [he meant outside the hospitals where Toronto's outbreak is centred] for 19 days" and were clearly "taken aback" to learn it. As a supposed example of Toronto having "exported" the disease, they cited a case of an Australian family, living in Oakville, whose young children had developed SARS-like symptoms on a visit back under, and which was so thoroughly investigated by Dr. Low et al here that they had not even thought of it in two weeks: That case probably wasn't SARS, he said, and in any case, the children recovered and no one else fell ill.

The WHO gang "started backpedalling" during the teleconference, he said, and abruptly threw into the mix a new case, which they say they learned of only after they issued their advisory, "of someone in Bulgaria who may have pneumonia" and may have some connection, as yet undetermined or confirmed, to Toronto, and who may or may not have SARS.

"Give me a break," snapped Dr. Low. "That's not how you make a decision to impose a travel advisory ... it's inexcusable." Absolutely "none of their arguments would hold water," he said; and he was plainly stunned that a body like the WHO, which sets global standards, would have had none in making a decision of this magnitude.

Absent scientific rationale, Dr. Low had only guesses about what was behind the advisory. "I think there's either pressure about the decision from China [that country was earlier the subject of a similar advisory] ... or maybe they were looking for another scapegoat and somebody in a back room said, 'Oh, let's put a travel ban on Toronto too' ... or that they're upset with us and decided to pay us back this way." It sure wasn't science, he said, so maybe it was politics; he didn't pretend to know what it was, only what it wasn't.

He was, in short, magnificent, and this was no bluster of the sort coming earlier in the week from Mayor Mel Lastman.

Dr. Low knows as much about SARS as any single person on the planet: He has actively treated many of the suspected and probable cases; he was himself in sheepish home isolation after potentially being exposed to the virus by one of his colleagues and emerged, as indeed have the vast majority of those in such voluntary quarantine, without ever having developed symptoms; he was one of the authors of a scientific paper on the first 10 Canadian cases that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

He knows the numbers, which are blessedly dropping every day, down 10 again yesterday from the day before, with only 89 people still in hospital. He has the facts. He is unafraid to acknowledge that he and his colleagues may have made mistakes -- chiefly of underestimating the virus and not insisting, for instance, that those working in the confines of SARS units have fitted face masks and custom goggles, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all variety -- but confident that one of them was not in how Ontario and Toronto counted the numbers.

He was asked about that yesterday, if, by counting not just probable cases but also suspected ones, Toronto's cumulative total number of cases may have unduly alarmed the WHO. "To me," he said, "a suspected case is a case of SARS, and to hide it is inappropriate ... I don't think that during any outbreak, we should try to be manipulating figures." Besides, the WHO is supposed to be capable of evaluating science.

But he now believes, knock on wood, that there is no longer a crisis, and he said, at one point recently, "Honest to God, I thought I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life." He doesn't, any longer.

By this point in the press conference, I had elevated Dr. Low to Honorary Colonel-in-Chief in the war on SARS, and was rather sorry that a scenario one of my colleagues had conjured up had not come true. "What if," the colleague said before the briefing, "Ernie [the Premier] comes in and he's coughing all over the place, and Dr. D'Cunha takes his temperature, and it's over 38C, and we're all in isolation -- with him! -- for 10 days?"

Ah, but the silver lining would have been Dr. Low would have been with us: At long last, the answer to the question posed in the old rock 'n' roll song War. And that's what it's good for, folks -- well, that and the emergence of admirable, solid, no bullshit heroes.

cblatchford@nationalpost.com

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