Posted on 04/28/2003 3:12:22 PM PDT by CathyRyan
WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - People around the world are overreacting to SARS, creating a sense of panic that could overwhelm common-sense measures for containing the virus, top AIDS experts said on Monday.
Sensational media coverage of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has killed 326 people worldwide, has fanned the flames, said David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on how viruses cause disease.
"I think there has been overreaction," Baltimore, a leading AIDS researcher who is now president of the California Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview.
"I have to agree with that," added Dr. David Ho, another top AIDS expert who heads the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York.
"Obviously, the fear comes from the fact that this is a novel disease. Many aspects of this epidemic are still mysterious. Fear of SARS is outrunning SARS per se," Ho added.
Ho and Baltimore ought to know. AIDS kills virtually everyone it infects without treatment and 20 years into the AIDS epidemic there is no cure and no vaccine.
In contrast, 94 percent of SARS patients recover.
Baltimore said World Health Organization moves have been appropriate, such as the controversial recommendation against travel to Toronto, where 21 people have died from SARS.
But boycotts of Chinese-owned businesses and scenes of people walking the streets of Hong Kong wearing surgical masks show that the general public does not understand the real dangers, Baltimore said.
"As much as overreaction, there has been a lack of balance, of putting it into perspective, because it is a real problem, no question," Baltimore said.
"But people clearly have reacted to it with a level of fear that is incommensurate with the size of the problem and I think it is getting in the way of a reasonable response."
"IRRESPONSIBLE" COVER-UP
The government in China, where SARS appears to have originated late last year, has been criticized for covering up the initial outbreak -- but officials there have said they feared creating the sort of panic that has been seen.
"The Chinese government was totally irresponsible in covering it up," Baltimore said. "We can't get away from that. It is a demonstration of the value of openness."
WHO has praised Vietnam for its response -- which was to immediately call for international help in handling its own outbreak of SARS. WHO has declared Vietnam to be free of SARS.
"This thing literally never would have happened on anything like the scale it happened if the Chinese had been open about it from the beginning," Baltimore said.
SARS, caused by a relative of one of the common cold viruses, has infected an estimated 5,300 people in nearly 30 countries. It has a mortality rate of about 6 percent, which is higher than comparable respiratory diseases such as influenza.
But while SARS is new and frightening, its impact, so far, has been minor. In a mild year, influenza and its complications kill an estimated 250,000 people around the world. Malaria kills at least a million, mostly children.
Yet earlier this month two Chinese runners were asked to pull out of a marathon in the Netherlands because of SARS fears. Many cities have reported people are avoiding Chinatown districts -- including New York, where no SARS cases have been confirmed.
"What happened to Hong Kong, for example, with the hotel occupancy rate at 2 percent, is an overreaction," Ho said.
Much can be blamed on media coverage, Baltimore said. "What we are seeing is a playing up of the things that make people worry," he said.
But, he added, perhaps scary reports are just giving readers and viewers what they want.
"In some sense people like to be frightened," he said. "And so, to some extent what I am saying is a denial of what seems to be a basic human instinct -- to get a sort of frisson (shiver) of excitement out of danger. And the press is playing into that."
You: Hope you are wrong. Since it rapidly mutates (like the cold viruses it is closely related to) you may very well be correct.
I CAN'T be incorrect. I cleverly used the word "may" when I said, "You may be able to get it again and again." I have a bullet proof escape clause.
(Hey... It's not as bad as Billy Boy's comment about what the meaning of "is" is.)
I do too. I suspect the lower level commie administrators are fearful of passing the bad news up the chain of command.
Probably similar to $1 million in ChiCom bribe money to Clinton/DNC weknow about = $10 million we don't know about.
They are going to need a lot of respiratory equipment, as well as economic cooperation in the face of zero travel.
And that's difficult to do when your people are rioting.
The rate of infections went linear, then less than linear, in Hong Kong in about a month. That's great, and speaks well of "panic". If we can get the same level of "panic" in China, instead of denial by people worried about economic effects, then we'll clobber this thing before it does any serious damage.
Which is after all the point. Fear or its absence, rationality or its absence, economic side effects or their absence, politics, funding, prestige - none of those are the point. They are ephermal distractions. People focusing instead of reducing its spread by whatever means, have their eye on the ball, and all the quibblers and lecturers do not.
Ephermal distractions? You're speaking about the life's blood of the PRC government. Their eye is most definitely on the ball, but it's the wrong one. Their major concern is for their appearance of strength, stability, and control to be maintained. This is why they took so long to be open about SARS, and this will continue to be a factor that shows them to be both incompetent and heartless.
Opening and closing lines - and it kind of sums up this whole situation, too. Add to that the fact that I think some people here on FR actually LIKED being the bearers of that supposedly really-bad, civilization-as-we-know-it-is-doomed news.
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