Posted on 03/29/2003 5:30:08 AM PST by CometBaby
My American friends living in Hong Kong called last night. The SARS in Hong Kong is much worse than has been reported. China has been fudging on the number of cases. He said that the number of new infections have been DOUBLING DAILY. It's spreading like wildfire. It's more contageous than has been admitted and there is no cure. The schools have all closed and many workplaces are not requiring employees to come in. They expect the Airport to CLOSE .. nobody knows exactly when, and people are scrambling to get out of the country before it does. The hospitals are all full and they plan to begin to quaranteen people in their homes.
He said that walking in Hong Kong is absolutely surreal .. everyone is wearing masks. And another thing .. they are running out of masks. It's really bad.
Basic math: It takes the same number of doublings to go from 1 to 1000 as it does to go from 1000 to 1,000,000.
To put it differently, the number of cases of SARS have been increasing by an average of 11% per day. If this kept up it will double every week. That means it will take two months for a single case to grow to 1000. It will then take two more months to grow to 1,000,000. This is just basic math. An actual epidemiological model is much more complex, but the basic concept is the same.
Hence the efforts to stop SARS now. It appears that the steps being taken in some countries to stop this are effective, which means it is still possible to keep this in the box. Let it loose in the general population and you will get to see exponential growth in action.
It appears that steps can be taken that would stop this thing. If those steps are not taken and this disease gets loose, it will be more a failure of political will than a failure of medicine.
Actually, it will become an issue with AIDS activists when funding for AIDS research has to compete with funding for SARS research. If SARS is as bad as it's potentially looking, there could be serious cuts for AID research. Of course, is there anyone bold enough to make that kind of choice left in government? Probably not.
So the same preventive measures for common cold may also help avoid SARS.
Some specific ideas:
-Keep your hands away from your face.
-Keep your hands clean and carry hand cleaner/antiseptic gel (all this must be tough for obsessive-compulsives; they've been proven partially right).
-Hot salt water gargle, I'm told, actually changes the chemical environment in your throat so that viruses can't live as easily in it. That's why it helps with sore throat. Have so far not found any double-blind studies or research reports which prove this. But it's not expensive to try. See Salt Water Gargle and Other Virus Remedies.
. Zinc supplements and nasal spray/gel; see e.g. http://www.drhoffman.com and go to the "Coldbusters" link. This actually features a research report on why zinc works on rhinoviruses. SARS may be affected similarly.
The Rolling Stones postponed, though you can be sure it wasn't Keef who made the decision - he's survived much worse!
Try six weeks.
Actually up until a week ago or so the official line was said it could only be transmitted by close personal contact like someone coughing in your face. Now it is being reported as totally airborne requiring respirators and HEPA filtration, negative pressure rooms etc in the vicinity of the victim. It was being treated that way in China before but we in America were not told this by health authorities. Do a search on SARS or china mystery disease.
Are you with the CDC? The information may have been handled internally in the CDC in an open manner but the information reported to the public downplayed or failed to communicate the Airborne nature and contagiousness of this disease. We don't need a panic.
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