SARS: A New Plague

[BeefyFigure]

SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is the worst air-travel related epidemic in history: it has claimed scores of lives, with thousands of people infected around the world.    

This is extremely worrying to me.  What can we do to combat it ?  Well, as far as I'm concerned, simple hygiene measures are advised, such as washing our hands.   Coronaviruses are often spread when an infected person touches a surface, leaving a virus that can survive for two to three hours.  Another person picks it up, who then infects himself by touching his/her nose or mouth. Keeping windows open and wearing a facemask may also help prevent transmission.

I just meant to share this with you as I feel it is important for us to know about it.  Any comments ?

     

[tasty]

Hope it doesn't come to the US. Maybe when more disgusting new diseases like this one start popping up, people will rethink their gross overuse of antibiotics. Medical professionals have said that as new resistant strains pop up each day, our medicines are getting less effective in fighting them. It seems the pharmaceutical industry needs to break out of their paradigm with regard to new illnesses like SARS, and other terminal illnesses like AIDS and cancer.

[PsYcO aSsAsSiN]

The big killer about this virus is that it has a long incubation period, so you could be infected long after contact with a sick person or a sick person who doesn't realize it yet can spread it to others.

Only (sensible) way to deal with this unfortunately will be to quarantine people as they are identified with SARS until a suitable cure can be found.

Just saw Tasty's post: It already has come to the United States

[Brain]

sin has a good point with the long incubation period, but his solution to the issue has a big flaw how can you ientify and quarentne someone who doesnt have any syntoms <sp?> yet?

correct me if i'm wrong but SARS has flu like syntoms as well, so many people may shrug it off as the flu.

also, if this desease is to be contained, it would best be done with a cure/ vaccine. this isnt like an ebola outbreak where the desease can run it's course(in a community) in about a week (ebola is actually self containing, it kills it's victims so fast, they rarely have time to spread the virus due it's bloodborne nature. if it were arborne however, things could get scary, although it would still be self containing. eventually. if you care to know more about filoviruses, you should read the hot zone) i could forseably having to contain an apartment structure for a month or more before it could be called 'clean'

[Mattster]

There is also someone in Canada who has SARS. I agree with Sin you should quartine the people who have it and isolate them from the rest of the world. This epidemic is similar to Black Death, it can spread fast and is deadly and is without a cure at yhis current point in time.

[kami]

Don't say it's without cure, your own body's immune system can repell it by itself, the death rate is just like 4%, although that's a lot it isn't going to be some huge black plague, these diseases come and go, no need to panic until Ebola becomes airborne
As of right now, the disease seems to be more or less contained in Hong Kong thanks to the use of face masks, they know the drill down there, happens all the time.
Tasty, although I agree that antiobiotics are grossely overused, it wouldn't affect this virus, antibiotics are strictly anti-bacteria.

[Brain]

i was under the impression that the lethality rate was closer to 25-50%

[kami]

A couple of thousand people infected, 60 dead.

[Mattster]

There are three types of Black Plague, the most common is bubonic, then pneumonic then septicaemic. Septicaemic has am mortality rate of 90-95%. The bubonic has am ortality rate of like 5-10% and the pneumonic has 20-25% mortality rate.

[Cossack]

Good try at sounding smart mattster, but what does that info have to do with SARS?  Anyhow on a different note, I would worry about it too much. As whatshisface said, it has only killed 60 people out of the hundreds that are infected with it.

[Brain]

oh, i missed this before.
kami, Ebola IS already airborne.  The Ebola-Reston strain is capable of airborne transmission, however when the Ebola-Zaire (i believe that's the right strain) strain mutated to become Ebola-Reston, it lost it's lethality to humans, although it is still just as deadly to other primates.

For those of you who may not know, Ebola Zaire has one of the highest mortality rates in the world at over 90% the other 2 strains that are a threat to humans (Ebola-Sudan, and Ebola-Ivory Coast) are in the neiborhood of 50-70% and 70-90%. Ebola is also is one of two members of a family of RNA viruses called the Filoviridae, the other member being the Marburg virus. Thus forming one of the most lethal virii families on the planet(although Marburg has a significantly lower mortality rate usualy in the 20-25% range)

[kami]

Didn't know that but what I was thinking about was an airborne Ebola deadly to humans.

500th post, wee

[Ross Koepke (BUll)]

Ok, think about this for a second. Why would it be hard create an effective quarantine action?

1) Thousands of people have already been infected and show symptoms. Even if we start here, where would we even keep all these people? Stadiums and prisons would be the only places that could handle this amount.

2) Long incubation period. Meaning that these thousands of people have probably infected at least  three people each before showing symptoms. How could you possibly track down and test all the people that have come in contact with any one of the thousands of infected people, and then quarantine them as well?

3) The best solution would probably to have someone come up with a miracle treatment and vaccine.

4) Unfortunately, if this thing can mutate relatively quickly to avoid eradication, then what will most likely happen is that the 2-4% or so people will die, and their genes will not be passed on, and the many people who can survive this disease will pass their immunity to their children and in one or two generations this won't be a problem. That's mean, but its been happening for 1.5 billion years. Which is a hell of a long time.

[kami]

Heh, that's a very cynical way to look at it, you could at least try to keep it under control, couldn't you? Of course a fast cure for it would be the best but how likely is that? We don't even have good medicines for the easiest colds. You don't have to lock people up, you can just make sure they don't leave where they live etc., it's not as hard as you think if everyone in the quarantine keeps to the quarantine regulations.

[Brain]

kami, one of the reasons we dont have a cure for the cold is because there are literally millions of strains. it would be unlikely that one 'cure' could cover them all.  and that's not even counting genetic adaptation

[kami]

True but you shouldn't go around thinking it's easy to prepare a cure for this disease just because it's one specific strand.

[Brain]

i didnt say it would be easy, i'm just saying that the cure for the common cold is one of the holy grails of medical science, alonng with a cure for cancer and aids.  while i would not expect it to be easy to cure, it would certianly be easier than the common cold

[pfc biohzrd]

SARS has a mortality rate of 4% per the last CDC report (04/10/03). There are diseases with a much worse rate than that, so i dont think there is a reason to panic (yet). Also, there have been 0 deaths in the United States which is attributed to better medical care, earlier diagnosis, and the low number of cases so far. Preliminary reports indidcate that this is a self limiting viral infection that causes remarkable interstitial pulmonary edema which can be managed with a mild diuresis and mechanical ventilation (if needed).

A couple of points. First, this is a viral illness so antibiotics won't touch it. With this in mind realize that when medical professionals are refering to resistant strains they are refering to bacteria, not virii. The antibiotics used when a person has a cold or pneumonia is not for the virus but to prevent an opportunistic bacterial superinfection. So this disease is not the result of inappropriate use of antibiotics. Also, if one doesnt think that a substantial amount of research is going into cancer and AIDS they havent been doing their homework to well. If you type the word AIDS into Medline (1996-2003) you will get 14413 articles. I think that is a substantial amount of research into those topics.

Next, The incubation period for SARS is 2-7 days. The incubation period for Rhinovirus is 2-4 days. Influenza virus incubates for 2-5 days. So, I would not qualify this as a long incubation. Consider Polio virus and AIDS virus which can incubate for up to 35 and 180 days respectively. Also, regarding transmission, the general rule is that one is not able to infect another person if they are not actively shedding the virus. This means coughing, nasal , oral, or other discharge. So, an asymptomatic person would not be able to spread the disease, by definition. I also just read that there is no evidence for contact transmission, only aerosol droplet spread.

Finally there are about 100 strains of Rhinovirus, not millions. The virility of the "cold" virus is because of its ability to change the nature of its glycoprotein coat allowing it to evade the immune system. This is analagous to a person who changes their clothes. Take for example someone like Brain, he changes his clothes every day, yet there are not thousands of Brains running around the world, just the same one wearing a different shirt.

Clarity my children,

bio

[Mr.Mellow]

Thanks for clearing all that up for them, Bio. Also, how many Americans have died from SARS? None that we know of. Now, why are the Chinese dying from it? Mostly because they are malnurished and aren't as healthy as Americans and Europeans. My guess is that the only people dying from this are the elderly and people who weren't healthy to begin with. The only reason the media is flipping out about SARS is because it's the only thing they have to cover besides the war. SARS isn't something that you should be terribly worried about unless you're really old or really unhealthy(like those damned, Godless pinko-communists over in China***), so relax and have some fun, and just wash your hands a little more than usual. Now, about the masks that the Chinese are wearing, I thought I'd let you guys know that once those masks get wet, bacteria and such is able to pass through them. So basically, they work for about 2 minutes, until the moisture from your breathing gets them nice and slobbery. They're more of a way to make people feel better than anything else.

***While it's a tragedy that people are dying from SARS, I still feel I can make jokes about the commies. Don't take offense to it.

[[V] Silverblade]

if anyone wants to get further details, take a look at www.virus-clan.org