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Thursday, May 08, 2003The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is purchasing 3,000 ventilators used for isolating SARS patients. They will be added to the nation's emergency stockpile of medical supplies set up to respond to a terrorist attack or other major event involving mass numbers of victims, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, CDC's director. The new ventilators will be used to supplement the 100,000 ventilators already in the stockpile, Gerberding said. If the number of U.S. SARS cases increases rapidly, the CDC's first response would be to "act fast," implement quarantines and shut down affected hospitals, she said. The saving grace would be that SARS is "not nearly as infectious as influenza" so it would not spread as rapidly, she added. ....The Food and Drug Administration also has "taken a number of steps to address a possible escalation of SARS cases in the United States," said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, the FDA's principal associate commissioner. These include putting the necessary regulations in place so experimental medications could be used in an emergency even if the therapies do not yet have full FDA approval, Lumpkin said. The FDA also is trying to expedite the development of a diagnostic test that can detect whether people are infected with the SARS virus and working with the public and private sector to develop a vaccine and identify potential medications that block the virus. The agency also has provided an exemption to the approval requirements for CDC so it can get its diagnostic test out more rapidly to labs around the country to help with diagnosing potential SARS patients, Lumpkin said. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., are working to develop a vaccine against SARS, but it probably will take "a couple of years at least," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a component of the NIH. Interesting, that bit about shutting down hospitals. A lot of hospitals are running on pretty thin margins. That could bankrupt them, since unlike Canadian, Chinese, and Hong Kong hospitals, American hospitals, with very few exceptions, aren't financed by the government. More SARS: And on the mortality rate debate, Michael Fumento sent along this article about yesterday's SARS death rate news, noting that the study probably suffers from selection bias: The first major study of SARS trends estimates that about 20 percent of the people hospitalized with the disease in Hong Kong are dying from it, but some experts believe the number is skewed because of the patients' ages. The average age of the Hong Kong patients is 50, and disease experts generally agree that the virus is much more deadly in people over 60. In fact, the new study puts the death rate for those over age 60 at 55 percent. The findings of the study, published yesterday on the Website of The Lancet medical journal, are similar to earlier, cruder estimates for Hong Kong, one of the areas hardest-hit by SARS. However, experts warn that the figures do not reflect the chances of the average person anywhere dying from a bout of SARS once they have contracted it. It also appears to be quite a bit lower in countries where the epidemic has played itself out: But WHO officials noted that the death rate is lower in places where the outbreak has ended or is nearing an end. "We know that in a real situation where the outbreak has completed itself from beginning to end - in Hanoi, Vietnam - they had an 8 percent case fatality rate," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson. That would agree with the New England Journal of Medicine's figures. (scroll down past the article links) Fumento also noted that the author of Lancet article (see yesterday’s post) has a reputation for scary epidemiology, especially when it comes to things like heterosexual AIDS transmission. And, Fumento has more on SARS scare statistics at NRO. posted by Sydney on 5/08/2003 07:54:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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