Worldwide Killer Disease? Ho Hum
Worldwide Killer Disease? Ho Hum
By Joe Bob Briggs
March 31, 2003
We must be getting numb to worldwide killer epidemic diseases. When the AIDS epidemic was first publicized--for that matter, even when herpes was first publicized--people flooded talk shows with nervous questions, badgered their doctors, and stocked up on snake oil. When Lyme disease and West Nile Virus turned up in the nineties, every cough and sniffle resulted in a visit to the emergency room.
With SARS it's just, "Ho hum. Sixteen hundred infected in six weeks. Sixty-one dead. How interesting."
Did I miss the memo telling us to relax?
I waited all day to see footage on CNN of the entire neighborhood that's been sealed off and quarantined in Hong Kong, and I swear it was about 15 seconds on a news roundup. Why do I get the impression that Cleveland could lose half its population to Bubonic Plague right now and no one would notice for three weeks?
This disease, from what I know of it so far, is much scarier than AIDS. At least with AIDS all you have to do is avoid unsafe sex. With SARS, we've got people in 13 countries infected as a result of people sharing an elevator with one guy.
Let's start with the name itself: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That's three scare words--severe, acute and syndrome-- and one word that's so vague it could include anything from whooping cough to emphysema. They should just leave "respiratory" out entirely and call it Severe Acute Dead People. What the name means is, "Well, we don't know how it got started or exactly what it is, but if you get it, you'll stop breathing quickly." Maybe the reason no one's scared is that the acronym is too namby pamby. We could use a few more headlines that call it "Turn Blue and Die For No Reason Disease."
Equally frightening are the symptoms to look out for. The first one is a fever--of 100 or more. Well, thank you for letting us know that it will announce itself so splendidly! People can have a fever of 100 and think they put too much Dave's Insanity Sauce on their burrito.
Next symptom: you'll cough. Once again, thanks for the giant red warning flag! Let's quarantine half the audience at the Metropolitan Opera.
Then the low-grade fever and the scary coughing is followed by . . . headaches, body aches and "malaise." Okay, now we've got 97 percent of New York City on any day the Dow Jones Index declines a hundred points.
Next symptom, within two to seven days: you can't breathe so you die.
Am I the only person who thinks this sounds like a recipe to wipe out half the planet? Psychosomatics will fill up the emergency rooms every time they have a cold, and everyone who actually HAS the disease will be found crumpled in their bathtubs, purple and bug-eyed.
And how about this method of transmission? First they thought it was water, then food, and now they think it might just be invisible droplets in the air. The reason we don't know for sure is that China, where the first case was discovered on November 16, 2002, didn't tell anybody about it until February, when they announced that a breakout of influenza in Guangdong province was "under control." That was right before Dr. Carlo Urbani, a World Health Organization expert, diagnosed an American businessman in Vietnam, said it was not influenza, it was some kind of new disease--and then promptly died himself. The least we should do is call it Urbani's Syndrome.
We might still be in the dark if it hadn't been for a professor from Foshan, in Quangdong--which, by the way, is what we used to call Canton--who went to Hong Kong to be treated for the disease, then four days later checked into the Metropole Hotel. Seven tourists who came into contact with the professor in an elevator then contracted SARS, which was thereby spread across several oceans and--just to give you one example--has resulted in a total quarantine of all employees of Scarborough Grace Hospital in Toronto. Once this so-called "super-spreader"--the Typhoid Mary of our tale--did his little global cough, the Centers for Disease Control and the WHO got involved and said, "What the hayull is going on here?"
What was going on is that China believed that an outbreak of a serious mystery disease in Quangdong was a "national security" matter--okay, now that's even more scary, what were they doing over there?--and so they put a news blackout on all their newspapers and TV stations. In fact, it wasn't until last Wednesday that they agreed to fully disclose all the cases they have--and then failed to do it. The truth is, we may not know how many people died in Quangdong.
Fortunately, we have crack microbiologists in rubber gloves and surgical masks studying cultures on three continents, and so what we know is . . . well . . .
In Hong Kong they say the disease is caused by the paramyxovirus family, which also causes measles.
But wait! The Canadians say it's caused by the metapneumovirus family, which is rarely found in humans and, when it is, normally causes respiratory disease in children.
But wait! The Americans say it's a coronavirus, similar to the one found in the common cold virus.
But wait! The Canadians counter that it could be two viruses, not one, and that the coronavirus part of it is a mutant animal strain of coronavirus. Listen to this quote from Frank Plummer, scientific director at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg: "It's somewhere between a mouse corona, a bird corona and a cow corona."
Thank you for being specific, Frank. Isn't this the point in the 1950s sci-fi movie where the scientists huddle around the examining table and say, "But, Dr. Streubing, it's mutating! It's changing! By Jove, it's never been seen on Earth before!"
Since all our most famous diseases--HIV/AIDS, mad cow, Ebola--are suspected of jumping from the animal to the human world, this would seem to be bad news. Or as Singapore Health Minister Lim Hng Kiang put it, "This is a nine-eleven for health."
What lends even more credence to the "bovine coronavirus" theory is that the disease apparently originated in the ranching country of Guangdong, where cattle are raised to supply beef to Hong Kong. That would explain how 213 people in a single apartment complex came down with the disease, which is now quarantined and guarded 24/7 by 50 cops wearing white surgical masks. You know those neighborhoods in Hong Kong where everyone is so jammed together that Jackie Chan can run across the roofs of buildings and leap out one apartment window and land in the apartment across the street? It's one of THOSE neighborhoods. Some guy could sneeze four apartments away and you could get it.
I'll leave you with just three SARS facts:
1. Guangdong Province alone has a population of 86.4 million, or roughly a third the population of the United States.
2. In China, Guangdong Province is the major supplier of goods to both the United States and Japan.
3. If it IS caused by the coronavirus--and the CDC keeps insisting it is--then we already know something about it from the way it works in the common cold. Despite the best efforts of every major drug company for the past 100 years, the viruses that cause the common cold are . . . incurable.
If nobody else is worried, then I'm not worried.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
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