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medpundit |
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Wednesday, April 16, 2003U.S. health-care workers, edgy over the contagious and sometimes fatal respiratory illness SARS, are pushing U.S. regulators to require isolation rooms and other safeguards to give hospital employees better protection from exposure to infected patients. It should be noted that SARS has not reached epidemic proportions here in the United States, and that most, if not all, hospitals have isolation rooms and other safeguards against infectious diseases. Perhaps they’re just being prudent. Yet, at the same time, the healthcare worker unions have discouraged their members from getting a vaccine that would protect against a similarly contagious, and far more deadly, infectious disease - smallpox. Do you suppose the SARS experience will change their minds? Meanwhile...back in parts of the world that have a real SARS problem, characteristics of the clinical course are starting to fall in place: Data available to WHO indicate that 96% of persons developing SARS recover spontaneously. The focus now is on the roughly 4% who are dying. WHO will hold a clinical teleconference on Wednesday to gather international experiences in the management of SARS patients and pool data on the results of various therapeutic regimens. That's reassuring. And so is this: the New England Journal of Medicine's daily graph (scroll down below the article links) shows the mortality rate remaining flat, even as the numbers of cases skyrocket. The CDC has posted (in pdf format) the genetic sequence of the virus and its protein analysis. And what is it with SARS and Chinese military hospitals? International health officials visited two secretive military hospitals in Beijing to check for unreported cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, and met with officials from a third, a team spokesman said Tuesday. The city's military hospitals are rumored to have unreported cases of the fatal disease and such visits are a priority for the World Health Organization team, which is examining how health authorities in the Chinese capital are handling SARS, team spokesman James Palmer said. I was skeptical of the bioweapon theory of SARS, but I'm beginning to think it more and more likely that it could have been an accidental release of a work in progress... UPDATE: The secrecy continues: World Health Organization investigators said Wednesday that China has previously unreported cases of the deadly SARS virus in military hospitals in Beijing and has barred release of details about them. The investigators who visited two military hospitals in Beijing said they saw SARS patients there and received data on new cases. But they wouldn't say how many patients there were, and said Chinese officials had told them not to release other information. posted by Sydney on 4/16/2003 07:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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