|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Saturday, March 29, 2003At this writing, SARS appears to have killed 49 people out of 1323 afflicted according to the World Health Organization, a death rate of less than four percent. In Hong Kong, that alleged "worst medical disaster" has killed ten people out of 316 known victims. But since this only takes into account those ill enough to seek medical help, the actual ratio of deaths to infections is certainly far less. In contrast, the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed approximately a third of the 60 million afflicted. Further, virtually all of the deaths have been in countries with horrendous health care, primarily mainland China. In the U.S., 40 people have been hospitalized with SARS. Deaths? Zero. Conversely, other forms of pneumonia kill about 40,000 Americans yearly. But he downplays its tranmissibility too much: Each year millions of Americans alone contract the flu. Compare that with those 40 SARS cases and – well – you can't compare them. Further evidence that SARS is hard to catch is that health care workers and family members of victims are by far the most likely to become afflicted. If SARS cases were allowed to go unchecked without the quarantine measures that have been taken, their could well be millions of Americans who get infected with it each year, too. The mortality of the average influenza case is also significantly lower than the 4% figure for SARS. Only 1,765 people died in 2000 from influenza, the majority of them elderly patients whose health was already compromised. (There are usually around the order of 95 million cases of influenza annually in the United States.) And he overestimates the effectiveness of Ribavirin. It isn’t clear that it’s all that effective: In SARS, numerous antibiotic therapies have been tried with no clear effect. Ribavirin with or without use of steroids has been used in an increasing number of patients. But, in the absence of clinical indicators, its effectiveness has not been proven. It has been proposed that a coordinated multicentred approach to establishing the effectiveness of ribavirin therapy be examined. Although he makes a good point that there are other already well-established infectious diseases that kill far more people and are deserving of more budgetary attention (such as tuberculosis and malaria), the global health community is right to be concerned about a viral pneumonia that appears more deadly and more contagious than the run-of-the-mill cold and flu. Every fifty years or so, the influenza virus undergoes a mutation that makes it especially lethal, such as occurred in 1918. It’s that sort of thing that the public health community is most concerned about. When a new infectious disease appears on the scene, they’re right to take a cautious approach. posted by Sydney on 3/29/2003 11:08:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
