Posted on 04/27/2003 5:55:12 AM PDT by Clive
It was shortly after 10 o'clock Wednesday morning in Switzerland when all hell broke loose at the Canadian Consulate in Geneva, not far from the World Health Organization (WHO) global headquarters.
Minutes before, a senior Canadian official at the consulate had been on the phone chatting with a U.S. diplomat about various issues, none of them related to the recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
Casually, assuming the Canadians already knew what he was about to say, the American dropped a bomb.
Someone over at WHO, he said, had just mentioned Toronto was getting slapped with an international travel advisory warning the world to avoid Canada's largest city because of SARS. Hours later, just such a WHO advisory would plunge Toronto -- and all of Canada -- into what may be its worst economic crisis ever.
Yet, the first Canadian officials knew of this pending disaster was from a foreign diplomat's second-hand gossip.
Even federal Health Minister Anne McLellan would later say the first she heard of the catastrophic WHO advisory was when it was issued later Wednesday.
How could this happen, that Canadian officials were caught so completely off guard on such a critical issue?
What went so terribly wrong that Canada became the first western country ever to be hit with a WHO travel warning?
By the end of Canada's week from hell, the answers to these and many other crucial questions remain largely blurred in an epidemic of fear-mongering and finger pointing.
Who's to blame for this mess? Interviews with key players in the SARS saga suggest the best answer is probably everybody and nobody in particular.
Nothing special
The WHO: Canadian officials claim the world's largest health organization condemned
Toronto on the basis of incorrect data and shoddy science. Even if that's not true, what responsible organization would knowingly put a bullet through the Canadian economy without warning? Nothing special occurred last Wednesday that demanded an instant travel advisory that day. It just happens the WHO board meets Tuesday afternoons and that's when the decision was made. Health Canada: The feds evidently didn't learn much from 9/11 and the ensuing anthrax scare
when they got caught with their plans down, and their emergency supplies on back order.
The SARS outbreak didn't suddenly happen this week -- it has been around long enough for Health Canada's huge army of bureaucrats and consultants to get its act together.
Instead, federal officials responded to the WHO bombshell with a stunning array of confusion and contradictions. Sometimes they just sounded lame.
Health Canada officials were asked, for instance, if this country would follow Singapore and Japan and start using hi-tech heat scanners at major airports to help spot passengers with a possible SARS fever. As Toronto's economy was imploding, a Health Canada official told reporters: "That is certainly something we would be interested in studying." Ontario government: Premier Ernie Eves and his cabinet responded to the crisis with the
same sense of apparent stunned bewilderment as their federal counterparts.
Thursday afternoon, one Ontario minister was talking about "life carrying on in a normal way," even as another was warning "it's worse than 9/11." If there is some master plan to deal with potential epidemics such as SARS, Ontario health officials must be keeping it to themselves. In the crucial early days of the outbreak in Toronto, hospitals ran out of protective masks for nursing and other front-line staff, and there were no standard procedures for dealing with incoming patients possibly infected with the contagious disease. Notably, it was several "ground zero" SARS cases that started to spread the disease in Toronto hospitals, touching off the wider outbreak. Toronto: Civic officials admit they were slow to respond to SARS. Perhaps not tough
enough on enforcing quarantines. It didn't help that the city's official spokesman in this crisis is Mel Lastman, the screaming mayor with nothing to say. No one to blame: A high-ranking WHO official involved in the issuing of the damaging
travel advisory told me that "nobody is trying to punish Toronto. On the contrary, Toronto has done a wonderful job from a public health point of view."
High number of cases
He said the WHO travel advisory was based entirely on the relatively high number of SARS cases in Toronto, and the fact some seem to have made their way to other countries.
"Luck is part of life, so it's certainly no smaller issue here ... Maybe it (SARS) wasn't recognized fast enough in the first cases that happened to hit Toronto ... and those were in hospitals and that helped spread the disease."
The U.S. and the rest of Canada, he said, "were probably just lucky they didn't get the first cases."
The WHO official said the international body will be closely monitoring the Toronto situation with a view to lifting the travel advisory as soon as it is deemed safe to do so.
"We all want to control the disease, and not interfere with lives too much." Let's pray it happens soon.
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