SARS Unknowns Keep Medical Experts Watchful

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The mysterious and deadly disease SARS is posing challenges for doctors, despite killing relatively few people, because so little is known about how to stop it, an international panel of medical experts said on Sunday.

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The mysterious and deadly disease SARS is posing challenges for doctors, despite killing relatively few people, because so little is known about how to stop it, an international panel of medical experts said on Sunday.The lack of a vaccine to control it, the relatively high mortality rate and unanswered questions about how and who it kills raise concerns even in the United States, far from the disease’s origins in China, doctors say.”I’m challenged to quantify how great (the) risk is,” said Todd Weber, a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and a member of the team investigating the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.”But it is, I think, still somewhat mysterious why a city like Toronto was so affected by SARS and the spread of SARS within the city and we have not been as affected … and the reasons for that are unclear,” Weber told reporters at a conference of the American Thoracic Society.SARS, a flu-like virus that appeared late last year, has killed 633 people worldwide, mostly in China and Hong Kong. An outbreak in Canada killed 23 people. The United States has reported 64 cases, but no deaths.Medical experts fighting SARS in China said they still do not understand why some people survive the disease, especially those in a small group dubbed “superspreaders,” who may infect hundreds.”Some appeared to die, while some were relatively healthy, even when they were sick and spreading (SARS) actively,” said Kenneth Tsang, a Hong Kong doctor who co-wrote a recent New England Journal of Medicine report on SARS.The doctor’s noted that millions of people get the flu each year, compared to just under 8,000 total SARS cases, and that pneumonia, for example, kills about 3,000 people each year in Hong Kong alone.And initial studies suggest wearing a surgical mask and washing one’s hands would largely protect a person from the SARS virus.Yet the disease has caused far more public panic than other diseases because of its still unfolding mysteries.”Compared with other viral diseases … maybe it’s early to say that the impact is not so big,” Tsang said. But the psychological impact and the actual physical impact on any health care system remained considerable, he said.(Source: Reuters, Sun May 18, 2003 07:09 PM ET, Chris Stetkiewicz)