SARS
It's probably about time that I commented on SARS.
Initially, I had the feeling that SARS was quite distant and would never affect me. I no longer have that feeling. The Canadian Trade Office went on home quarantine the week they were supposed to come to my school and speak. The roommate of one of my students is also home quarantined, meaning that my student can't come to class either. And then there is the weekly SARS scare at school.
Nevertheless, SARS is not that dangerous; at least in Taiwan. It's not anthrax or the bubonic plague. There are only 35 SARS-related deaths, 274 probable cases, and a further 287 suspected cases in Taiwan, putting it a distant second behind China. The death rate is somewhere above 13%. It is extremely difficult to get, needing direct and intimate contact with an infected person. You need to ingest infected tissue, usually coughed up, to contract the disease.
The flip side of this is the Taiwan Ministry of Health is having an extremely hard time controlling the disease because people won't cooperate with the control procedures. It has proven almost impossible to get Taiwanese to stay in home quarantine. A new problem has been people reporting to an emergency room with SARS-like symptoms, then refusing to reveal an accurate medical history. The doctor misses SARS as a diagnosis, gets infected himself, and goes on to infect everyone else in the ER.
It is doubtful that SARS will disappear completely from Taiwan. But then, there are plenty of other diseases floating around the place that have all but disappeared in more developed regions of the world; dengue fever, hepatitis B, to name the ones that come to mind immediately. SARS will stop being the killer that it is today, but this will take a lot longer than it did in Toronto. Who knows how long it will take? Weeks? Months? My guess is three or four months.
SARS will just become another health problem that immigration authorities look for in travelers returning from Taiwan. Once in a while, it will pop up and kill someone, but it won't be any more serious than TB (which I apparently have had) or cholera (which a friend of mine caught in Morocco). It will remain a symbol of the remaining struggle that Taiwan faces in its battle to join the more developed nations.
For more information about SARS see
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/basics.htm
12:02:24 PM 
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