A Google News search for “James Salisbury” will give you the latest details. This makes my blood boil.
He was an English teacher working in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. He went down with SARS a week or so ago. From what I can tell here in HK…
Friends tried to get him transferred to hospital in HK. Shenzhen officials refused (they are trying to maintain that they have had only 15 cases of SARS)
When he was all-but dead, yesterday evening, they hurriedly bundled him into an ambulance. He was DOA in HK
Shenzhen officials say he caught it in HK. Friends say he hadn’t visited HK in months
His 6 year old son is in poor condition in a HK hospital
The global fear of SARS is over-done. But openness about how many people have it, and where, is key to controlling it. The Mainland Chinese secrecy about it has cost lives. This guy is just one example. The virus kills a few people who catch it. The communist culture of secrecy kills more.
SARS is now global, and too big to get a handle on. At a death rate of 2%, 160 million people will die from it. If you factor in those whose health is already compromised from AIDS in the African continent and Asia, the overall death rate will be higher.
All because the Chinese government didn’t want to look bad.
Heck, maybe they engineered the virus to get rid of the AIDS problem that they don’t admit they have.
Are you serious? 160 million “will” die?? That would require every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth to contract SARS. That’s absolutely preposterous, since there’s no indication SARS is anywhere near virulent enough to do anything close to causing widespread pandemics.
Just out of curiosity, what are the chances that this disease has existed in some of the more rural areas of China for a long while, but is just now getting notice because of it’s global travels? It seems the biggest fear is the way it’s already moved across the globe. One person walking into an airport could say, infect ten people, and each of those persons can go to a completely different destination from there. It’s a big deal because of this, I think, so the real deal is to put a check on international travel.
Why’d this have to happen two weeks before my trip to Japan? Any news of it hitting over there?
CRorex Straightened my flawed reasoning out in this thread He makes a very solid case for the transfer of SARS by bodily fluids.
I do feel that if this were virulant and airborne, a majority of the world’s population would eventually catch it. That could well take years, and would require it to be contagious before showing symptoms, which has been posited in the press, but looks to be false.
So far, so good, according to the official reports, but then the Japanese government also has a history of selectivly reporting unpleasant medical facts. Until just a few years ago, the official line was that AIDS was something only foreigners had.
