Posted on 04/02/2003 7:55:35 PM PST by InShanghai
New Disease Scary, but Not as Bad as Flu -- Yet
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It jumped from ducks to farmers in the densely populated southern provinces of China, spreading via jet to the whole world within a year and killing half a million people. SARS? No -- just ordinary influenza.
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As world health officials scramble to identify and contain the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, they are drawing constant parallels with flu, a much more familiar -- and so far deadlier -- foe.
SARS has killed an estimated 78 people and made 2,151 ill, the World Health Organization (news - web sites) said in its latest update.
In contrast, influenza kills anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people every year around the world. In the United States, with a vaccine and modern medical care widely available, flu kills at least 36,000 people a year.
New strains regularly pop up, with varying degrees of lethality.
The "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918 killed between 40 million and 50 million worldwide, most of them young, healthy adults. The "Asian flu" and "Hong Kong flu" pandemics of 1956-1957 and 1967-1968 killed a combined 4.5 million people.
The SARS outbreak is tiny in comparison, said Dr. Richard Duma, head of infectious diseases at the Halifax Medical Center in Daytona, Florida, and a member of the board of the National Foundation for Infectious Disease. "I think it is frightening a lot of people but I don't think it will produce the mortality that influenza will produce," Duma said.
In fact, when SARS cases were first reported in Guangdong early this year, experts assumed it was another outbreak of a deadly strain of influenza known as H5N1.
BIRD SLAUGHTER STEMMED OUTBREAK
In 1997, Hong Kong authorities slaughtered more than a million chickens and ducks to stem the epidemic of "bird flu" that came to be known by its genetic nickname of H5N1. It killed six people and infected 18.
Richard Webby, an influenza virus expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, noted that three members of a Hong Kong family who visited Fujian Province in southern China became infected with H5N1 early this year and two of them died.
They were the first known human cases since 1997.
U.S. and WHO experts knew of a larger outbreak of respiratory disease in China's Guangdong province at the time and assumed it was more H5N1, which alarmed them.
The new outbreak has since been identified as SARS, which may be caused by a different virus, known as a coronavirus.
But the parallels with influenza are obvious. Both are respiratory diseases, both are highly infectious and both, apparently, have jumped from animals to people.
And both were born in China. Influenza begins as an infection of birds, one that does not make its avian hosts ill. A slight mutation allows it to move into people, sometimes via pigs as an intermediate host.
Once a person recovers from influenza, he or she has immunity to that strain. But every year a new strain jumps from the flocks of chickens, ducks and geese raised in China, forcing vaccine makers to come up with a new formula.
Something similar may have happened with SARS, said Mike Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who has for years been warning about such emerging infections.
"You have the world's largest population in China. You have the world's largest population of pigs in China, the world's largest population of aquatic birds. You have close contacts and you have a lot of different species where these agents are floating around, and you are going to see a jump from animals to people," Osterholm said in a telephone interview.
Only SARS looks worse than ordinary flu. It kills between 3.5 percent and 4 percent of known victims -- a rate higher than the 1918 influenza epidemic, the worst epidemic in recorded history, in which 3 percent of patients died.
In an average year, influenza kills fewer than 1 percent of patients, experts said.
"Four percent mortality -- that is a lot of people if you multiply it by a few million," Webby said.
Where are the SARS survivors?
The Hong Kong SARS site lists discharged patients along with total cases [for Hong Kong only.] This site is a little odd, but if you read their latest Figures on Atypical Pnuemonia as 1 PM April 2, 2003 the discharged tally is ahoqn. The breakdown is 89 discharged out of 708 total cases. They break down this down as 51 out of 175 infected health workers and 38 out of 533 for the general populace.
http://www.info.gov.hk/dh/ap.htm
Okay, I'm no MD...but it's put my mind at ease for now.
Current cases in the US: 85.
Worldwide cases March 31st: 1622
Worldwide cases April 1st: 1804
WorldWide cases April 2nd: 2223
16,000 AIDS related deaths in the U.S. in 2001, according to the CDC. Hmmm...
The news outlets are now starting to report about a "contained" virus, however they are also giving advice on how to avoid viral infections - go figure.
per loin has a great chart he's posted on a couple of other threads recording the increases in reported infections etc...
| Time | Number of cases | Percentage increases | Number of current deaths as a percentage of case totals on previous days | |||||||||||
| Day | Date | New | Total | Day | Week | Deaths | Today | Day ago | 2 Days | 3 Days | 4 Days | 5 Days | 6 Days | Week |
| Wed | 03/19 | 150 | ||||||||||||
| Thu | 03/20 | 23 | 173 | 15.33% | ||||||||||
| Fri | 03/21 | 30 | 203 | 17.34% | ||||||||||
| Sat | 03/22 | 19 | 222 | 9.36% | ||||||||||
| Sun | 03/23 | 25 | 247 | 11.26% | ||||||||||
| Mon | 03/24 | 13 | 260 | 5.26% | ||||||||||
| Tue | 03/25 | 26 | 286 | 10.00% | ||||||||||
| Wed | 03/26 | 30 | 316 | 10.49% | 110.67% | |||||||||
| Thu | 03/27 | 51 | 367 | 16.14% | 112.14% | |||||||||
| Fri | 03/28 | 58 | 425 | 15.80% | 109.36% | |||||||||
| Sat | 03/29 | 45 | 470 | 10.59% | 111.71% | 10 | 2.13% | 2.35% | 2.72% | 3.16% | 3.50% | 3.85% | 4.05% | 4.50% |
| Sun | 03/30 | 60 | 530 | 12.77% | 114.57% | 13 | 2.45% | 2.77% | 3.06% | 3.54% | 4.11% | 4.55% | 5.00% | 5.26% |
| Mon | 03/31 | 80 | 610 | 15.09% | 134.62% | 15 | 2.46% | 2.83% | 3.19% | 3.53% | 4.09% | 4.75% | 5.24% | 5.77% |
| Tue | 04/1 | 75 | 685 | 12.30% | 139.51% | 16 | 2.34% | 2.62% | 3.02% | 3.40% | 3.76% | 4.36% | 5.06% | 5.59% |
| Wed | 04/2 | 23 | 708 | 3.36% | 124.05% | 16 | 2.26% | 2.34% | 2.62% | 3.02% | 3.40% | 3.76% | 4.36% | 5.06% |
| Averages | 11.79% | 119.58% | 2.33% | 2.58% | 2.92% | 3.33% | 3.77% | 4.25% | 4.74% | 5.24% | ||||
Most of those are people returning from the hot zone, but I am not ready to claim that it has been contained. I do look forward to per loin's graph.
Since China has hidden just about ALL info, no one really knows about the fatality rate of SARS. And, for the record, even inits early days, the Spanish Flu infected and killed far MORE people, world wide, than SARS has. Facts are our friends, dear; hysteria and erronious codswallop aren't. ;^)
Think about that. Parents are accused of neglect and loose custody of their children because they are worried about a vaccine that would save about 100 children a year... that NOATIONALLY folks. (minus the few that the vaccine itself kills) Kids can't go to school or day care.
And I wonder how many of those kids who were killed by measles were unhealthy in the first place. Perhaps, if we only vaccinated the few high-risk kids we would be better off. (Yes, I know. More sick days off from work to care for sick kids, but hey...)
And the flu kills over 35,000. Perhaps our money could be better spent else where.
I meant that Flu normally kills only people with weakened immune systems.
And if you are seriously comparing SARS to the Spanish Flu, you have made the point that it is nasty stuff.
Do you enjoy scaring yourself so, over something that you have little to no control over and which shows NO signs of being an huge pandemic ? Want something to REALLY worry about ? Worry about the East Nile virus or Lyme disease, which you have a far better chance of getting and dying / being a valetutinarium from .
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