sars

[4getmenot]

With all this hype over bird flu it made me remember SARS, what ever happened to it?

[redcrx]

it turned out to be a bit of a damp squib didnt it.

The problem is that we are given too much information too early nowadays. The Bird flu COULD turn into a strain thats passed from birds to humans. It COULD then turn into a pandemic and the latest is that it COULD kill 100,000 children in UK alone or just 50,000 if we close the school system down for the duration of the pandemic.

With all this info around everyone is sure to panic and yet if they didnt give us this info we would panic that the powers that be didnt tell us what was happening.

I think with SARS they did the same as they are doing now, focussed on what could happen. Luckily it didnt

[jake-the-peg]

I dare you to say that in Toronto redcrx!

Hundreds died from SARS - it's estimated that without the UN's World Health Organisation those hundreds could have easily been tens of millions.

Unlike the current strain of bird flu SARS was/is transmissable from person to person by contact.

It was a very very close run thing

[jno]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS

It remained mostly confined to Asia except for the outbreak in Canada - but it was the latter that has made western governments nervous; one passenger on a plane was all it took.

[redcrx]

My apologies Jake-the-peg, I omitted to say 'in the UK', which is probably what 4getmenot meant when asking her question.

[morg_monster]

I can see the same thing happening if we don't get a bird flu outbreak - everyone will just say the government, WHO (world health organisation), 'experts' and scientists were exaggerating the risks, scare mongering, spending too much money on something that was never a real risk. Whereas maybe they should be saying "Gosh aren't they all clever, they managed to avert a catastrophe... what a good investment of our taxes, to save thousands of lives, well done and thankyou!".
Well anyway you get my drift! Unfortunately you can't really make news out of something that doesn't happen - or at least the newspapers won't report on it. I think this is what happened with SARS - a lot of hard work prevented it becoming more newsworthy! (though I do agree that it was never as much of a threat to the UK as in Asia - but it really could have been - look at Toronto as jake-the-peg says)

[WoWo]

Exactly the same thing happened with the Millenium Bug. There wasa load of fuss about it reporting all these doomsday scenarios but nothing happened. This was actually a result of all the fuss as it got people into action to limit what damage may have occured.

If we would have had plans falling out of the sky nobody really knows but what we do know is that in most cases things had been done to prevent it.

This is an interesting read on the subject of a possible Flu pandemic

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php ?newsid=41292