When an epidemic becomes global, it is described as a pandemic. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is global and is therefore a pandemic. But is it an epidemic that deserves such panic? Possibly. The very day that the World Health Organization decided that Singapore had beaten the outbreak, Toronto in Canada recorded a resurgence of the disease, which earlier this month the WHO declared had been beaten there.
Meanwhile the number of new infections and deaths in China and Taiwan continues to rise. The Canadians have now been criticized for lifting their restrictions too soon, because of the immense economic damage that SARS had produced both to Toronto’s commercial life and its tourist industry. Currently, some 70,000 people are back in quarantine in their homes, schools and hospitals are closed, and, perhaps most shocking, nurses who fear the increased danger of exposure to the disease in hospitals, are quitting their jobs.
Yet the death toll worldwide has still not passed one thousand. To get some sense of perspective, in the month of December last year some 1,150 people died in 888 accidents on South African roads. That horrific highway death toll is still only a fraction of the number of car wrecks around the world, the deaths from which dwarf the fatalities from SARS. So too do the numbers of people slain by AIDS and malaria.
Clearly what is informing the international medical community is the disastrous influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919. In 18 months, this true pandemic killed more than 40 million people around the world, more than had died on all the different fighting fronts in the barbarity of the four-year-long World War I. One in five people caught this Spanish flu. In the US, 20 million cases were reported and up to a million people died, normally from conditions such as pneumonia that assailed constitutions already weakened by the flu itself.
On the face of it SARS could be every bit as devastating. But is the vast medical and logistical effort being deployed to combat it, really commensurate with its danger or does it perhaps reflect the paranoia of the wealthy First World about any sort of ill health? The authorities in China have come in for global criticism for their efforts to conceal the disease in the early days of the outbreak. Implicit in the complaints of World War I is that, for all its growing economic strength, China behaved like an incompetent and secretive Third world country.
SARS is something that threatens the comfort and complacency of wealthy countries in Europe and North America, the nightmare of the increasingly sterilized and germ-free societies they have built for themselves.
