SARS speculation

A standard investigative technique is to look at the possible suspects in a crime, and see who benefits. If SARS is man-made, who benefits?

Here's a hypothesis. WWI wasn't really 'won'. The armistice was a result of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 raging through the trenches of the European battlefield and making both armies incapable of continuing operations. Saddam and his people carefully studied their mistakes in Gulf War I, and they realized that conventional military tactics were not going to save them.

SARS popped up in the perfect place. China has a dense population with a poor , insuring a rapid spread of the disease and making successful quarantene efforts extremely unlikely in the critical early stages of the epidemic. This created a large infected population. With modern transportation and the ChiCom's well-known standard 'lie & deny' way of dealing with internal epidemics, spread of the disease to the rest of the world was certain. A Chinese 'origin' also provides deniability and reduces suspicion of bioterrorism. I can't think of a better plan for the initial stages of a bioattack.

As we know, efforts to control SARS have been futile, and there's no treatment for it yet. Even if we get a vaccine, we'll never be able to make enough of it to make a difference before the epidemic spreads worldwide. We must face the fact that we are up against a pandemic we likely can't stop.

When SARS gets to our troops, most of them will be violently ill and out of action for two weeks. They could already be infected and the incubation time ticking away as we speak. If the disease follows current patterns, 10% of the infected will require hospitalization, with over one-third of those dying pretty quickly and the rest needing extended care, possibly for months. We won't have the 20,000+ needed hospital beds for our troops, and we won't be able to ship the infected out, as by that time, there will be no hospital beds available elsewhere and quarantene efforts will be in full swing. If this happens before we take Bagdhad, we may never take it. Could it be that our military has already recognized these realities, and the 120,000 new troops are being sent to the Gulf, not as a rear-area security force as claimed, but as replacements for expected SARS cases ???

In addition, there will be the problems we face at home and in the rest of the world. If the progress of the disease remains as it is, we're looking at nearly 200 million dead and 400 million needing extended care. You all know what this would do to the world economy. We simply couldn't afford to continue any military operations overseas anywhere. With the potential panic among the American sheeple, we may need to bring the troops home on an emergency basis just to deal with establishing order here. Martial law and draconian quarantene measures might well be instituted. Our focus would (and maybe will) be forced inward, away from the Middle East and Iraq.

All of this is incredibly convenient for the Iraqis. We moved faster on the political front in getting the Iraq campaign started and faster on the battlefield in laying siege to Bagdhad than the Iraqis probably calculated. If our timetable was only a month behind what it is, the Iraq campaign may have never gotten off the ground due to the SARS pandemic. It's clear to see who benefits from SARS. It's the first pandemic we've seen since the polio epidemic in the mid-20th century. We know that the Iraqis have spent $billions$ persuing genetic engineering technology for biowarfare purposes. And the timing of SARS is perfect for the Iraqi's purposes. Did the Iraqis take the lesson of WWI and the Spanish Flu epidemic, and try to duplicate it themselves?

ca:
"I have read the articles. I've keeping up with this since my wife works in a hospital."

Presumably, being a health professional, she's not just blowing off the SARS threat the way you seem to be.
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ca:
"I was referring to the statements from this article."

It's not an article; it's just my thoughts on the matter.
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ca:
"Do you really think we're going to have 200 Million dead and 400 million in the hospital."

I don't know; none of us do. But I see the potential for such a disaster is certainly there, and to pretend otherwise, looking at the facts, would be silly.
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ca:
"Back in the '70s Swine Flu was called the new Spanish Flu. They held mass vaccinations in the US. Then it turned out to be way overhyped It wasn't really that deadly after all. More people died from the vaccinations than the disease."

Your 'logic' here seems to be, "we dodged the bullet last time, thus all bullets are imaginary and should be ignored." Please excuse me if I don't subscribe to that theory.

Here's some background material on the Hong Kong swine flu incident and the Spanish flu. I may change your perspective:

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The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, and the Hong Kong Incident
Mankind's most devastating recorded global epidemic, and it's latest close call
As their lungs filled, the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business.
--Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
By the fall of 1918 a strain of influenza seemingly no different from that of previous years suddenly turned so deadly, and engendered such a state of panic and chaos in communities across the globe, that many people believed the world was coming to an end. It struck with amazing speed, often killing its victims within just hours of the first signs of infection. So fast did the 1918 strain overwhelm the body's natural defenses, that the usual cause of death in influenza patients---a secondary infection of lethal pneumonia---oftentimes never had a chance to establish itself. Instead, the virus caused an uncontrollable hemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and patients would drown in their own body fluids.
Not only was the Spanish Flu strikingly virulent, but it displayed an unusual preference in its choice of victims---tending to select young healthy adults over those with weakened immune systems, as in the very young, the very old, and the infirm. The normal age distribution for flu mortality was completely reversed, and had the effect of gouging from society's infrastructure the bulk of those responsible for its day to day maintenance. No wonder people thought the social order was breaking down. It very nearly did.
But at the close of the First World War, when Spanish Flu appeared, the world was a very different place. Since then, outstanding advances in our knowledge of the germ world have been made, adding dramatically to our repertoire of medical wizardry. Surely what happened back then couldn't happen again.
Or could it?
During the 1918-1919 fall period the number of Americans who died from influenza is estimated at 675,000. Of those, almost 200,000 deaths were recorded in the month of October 1918 alone. Worldwide, the mortality figure for the full pandemic is believed to stand somewhere between 30 to 40 million. So, with the world population today having more than tripled in the intervening years, what is to stop a modern flu pandemic from claiming upwards of 100 million lives? The answer, it seems, is nothing at all.
Today, of course, we have vaccines and antiviral drugs. But in the Third World, at least, these combatants are in very short supply. In India, where the Spanish Flu is thought to have culled more than 10 million from the population, public health care is still notoriously deficient. In China, with a population one third larger again, the situation is not much better. Even for developed countries, where vaccines are readily available, the fraction of the population that routinely subjects itself to inoculation generally hovers around 10 percent. In the event that the public were to receive adequate warnings of an impending pandemic, it's likely of course that this number could be significantly increased. But even then, it may not matter. By their nature pandemics tend to take us by surprise. The next influenza strain that ravages the human population will probably not be the one we were planning to encounter.
If all this seems a little alarmist in nature, consider for a moment the recent controversy surrounding what Robert Webster, chairman of the Department of Virology and Molecular Biology at Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, has called The Hong Kong Incident.
In 1997 epidemiologists and public health officials from around the world got their first glimpse¹ of an entirely new variety of human influenza. Known as subtype H5N1 for the surface proteins which the virus carries, the new strain had only ever previously been observed in birds. Ominously, the effect of H5N1 on poultry had earned it the evocative title of "Chicken Ebola." And when it surfaced in the human population of Hong Kong last year it proved to be almost as deadly.
How deadly? Even with the advantages of intensive-care treatment, fully one third of the first 18 confirmed cases never recovered. They died. The numbers are suggestive of the death tolls suffered by immunologically-isolated Alaskan villages in 1918, where, in some cases, half the population was lost to the disease. In Hong Kong, bird-to-human contact is believed to have been the transmission route. Fearing a public health crisis, city officials in December of 1997 ordered the slaughter of Hong Kong's entire poultry population. All ducks, geese, and chickens in the city were killed. Fortunately it appears the H5N1 subtype lacks the ability to transmit itself through the air from one human host to the next potential victim.
On the surface, HK97 shows the hallmarks of what might be described as a "near miss" for our species. In other words, a biological catastrophe. Or it could be a false alarm. It's too early to say. Either way, it's hard to argue that we didn't just receive a wake-up call of sorts. Maybe what happened in 1918 has today merely the substance of a tenuous memory, but it also marks a lesson that clearly would be dangerous to forget. On the scale of a human life span, pandemic influenza is a rarity, but no-one seriously doubts that it will be back.
As Webster reminds² us, "All the genes of all influenza viruses in the world are being maintained in aquatic birds, and periodically they transmit to other species... The 1918 viruses are still being maintained in the bird reservoir. So even though these viruses are very ancient, they still have the capacity to evolve, to acquire new genes, new hosts. The potential is still there for the catastrophe of 1918 to happen again."
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To check out an article about the current effort by Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, to sequence the genome of the 1918 strain, CLICK HERE.
For related information about The 1918 Project---a Canadian-led scientific effort to recover the genes of the virus from several coal miners who died during the Spanish Flu pandemic---visit the official site, which can be reached by CLICKING HERE. An expedition to the frozen graveyard in Longyearbyen, a tiny mining town on one of the Norwegian islands north of the Artic Circle, was undertaken during the summer of 1998.
References:
¹ "The Flu Hunters," Erik Larson. An account of the Hong Kong Incident. Time, February 23, 1998.
² The Invisible Invaders, Peter Radetsky. Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Page 246.

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