Why the silence...?

My favorite blogs (listed on this site) have been curiously silent to date on SARS, and I'm wondering why.

For my case, I've been reluctant to contribute to the gradual but steady buildup of hysteria, as the mainstream media beast turns its lumbering head from contemplating the war in Iraq to focusing on the mysterious illness.

At the same time, several facts concern me.

First, the scientific community has announced various SARS "breakthroughs," only to subsequently backpedal furiously when new cases and evidence fail to corroborate their original theories.

For example, health officials have been unable to detect the virus thought to cause SARS in a high percentage of the most recent fatalities.

Also, after touting that countries with well-established, modern public-health systems seem capable of containing outbreaks--allowing citizens in "developed nations" to breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss the illness as a "third world" problem-- the World Health Organization this week issued a health advisory against unnecessary travel to Toronto--provoking an emotional firestorm from Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman (unfortunate name, considering) and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. They and others are furiously lobbying WHO to reverse, or at least tone-down, the advisory, hoping to salvage mega tourist dollars hanging in the balance--a lost cause at this point, I'd wager.

More troubling, a N.Y. Times article on Tuesday states that the SARS death rate, while low, is climbing, rather than decreasing as typically occurs over time:

But as the number of cases has increased — to 3,861 yesterday — the death rate has also steadily risen, leaving health officials worried. Lacking a precise explanation for the rise, health officials have generated a number of theories.....

[...]

One theory for the rising SARS death rate is that the initial cases involved health care workers who were healthy 20-to-45-year-old adults and who had better access to health care than others. Then, as the infected health workers unintentionally spread the disease to family members and friends, and they, in turn, to others, SARS has infected an increasing number of older people with heart disease, diabetes and other chronic ailments.

A second theory is that many of the SARS deaths occurred among patients who became ill weeks ago but who died only recently, after extended hospital stays.

Still another, and more disputed, theory is that the SARS virus, a newly discovered member of the coronavirus family, has become more virulent as it infected new generations of cases....

[...]

If the death-rate trend continues, SARS will be unlike the first outbreaks of other newly discovered microbes where the initially high death rate substantially declined as the development of diagnostic tests and further epidemiologic investigation documented the existence of mild, even asymptomatic, cases.

A confusion among health experts over the cause SARS is most troubling.

On Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta posted on its Web site (www.cdc.gov) an advisory to doctors caring for SARS patients, saying the cause of the disease was unknown. The update came days after the W.H.O. had announced that the coronavirus was the cause of SARS and created some confusion as to whether the Americans and the W.H.O. disagreed on the matter. Although a C.D.C. spokesman said yesterday that the update was in error and would be corrected, the Saturday version remained on the Web site last [Monday] night.

And it is still there.

I sincerely want to be overreacting here. But I can't help flashing back to the early, early days of HIV. I was living in San Francisco and heard the first word-of-mouth rumors about a strange illness that was killing gay men. Granted, we are far from as naive now as then, in large part due to the AIDS epidemic. But the "fortunate" characteristic about HIV--and I use the word loosely, having lost far too many friends and acquaintances to AIDS--is that the virus is extremely hard to transmit. SARS, on the other hand, can be spread casually, from one person to another, by sharing an elevator or breathing the same air in a hallway.

According to the N.Y. Times, the current 5.6% death rate is much higher than the less than 1% rate for the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed 20 million to 40 million people worldwide because it spread so quickly.

Entire story here.