Evolutionary Time Bombs...SARS (Can disease be conquered, contd.....)

SARS, an acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, was first identified in Viet Nam on 28th of Feb, 2003, when Dr. Carlo Urbani, an epidemiologist from the WHO office in Hanoi examined a patient with a severe form of pneumonia with no known cause....

Who could have guessed the disease would spread like wildfire and soon it would be the subject of untold column inches, (including my blog here :P) and television programmes, with world maps in newspapers showing its insidious spread around the globe! By 11th of March, at least 20 hospital workers in hanoi's private french hospital, and 23 at a hospital in Hong Kong were ill with a similar acute respitratory syndrome...And even now, as much of the world seems to be recovering and getting SARS under control, other parts of the world like china and Hong Kong are struggling to contain it, living under a perpetual fear of a mutant striking back....

SARS affected 8422 persons worldwide, leaving 900 odd dead at last count. It remains to be seen how SARS virus plays out in the future. 2 years is an early time to discuss its long term ramifications.....What is clear, however is that the threat from rogue viruses is a very real one. These evolutionary time bombs explode in our midst so often, and are likely to become ever more prevalent in the face of burgeoning and mobile populations and greater population densities.

SARS is not the first 'Killer virus', and undoubtedly not be the last, History has a habit of knocking down those that ignore the lessons it teaches. I am tempted to give the example of a strain of influenza which hit the world like a thunderbolt way back in 1918. An estimated twenty five times more deadly than normal influenza, it was fatal in 2.5% of cases and has been estimated to have killed anywhere between 20 and a 100 million people worldwide! Today we are dealing with Avian influeza 0157, a characterstic pandemic, spreading across nations, what i would call a 'typical rogue'.... History has knocked at our doors again, time to sit up and listen...