Be careful! I am reading reports that way more people have SARS than are officially being reported. Carry a face mask whereever you go. It aint worth dying and living your last days of your life with a high fever in a dingy foreign hospital. Last report is that SARS was found in fecal matter (human shit) and it was spread by the water system!!

There is a cure and there is only 3% mortality.
Antibodies from prior patients plus retrovirals are a cure.
SARS is getting a lot of publicity but ebola is worse as far as deaths are concerned.
Wash your hands!!
SARS would not stop me from going to Thailand or Japan or PI. Hong Kong I would defer.

Wrong!! There is NO CURE! What you mentioned is a drug therapy program that may work. It is not a cure! Like HIVAIDS, there are drug therapy programs, but no cure.

Also, it is 4% mortality, not 3%.

Geez, what ridiculous scaremongering over SARS. I was at my doctor's yesterday, and we had a good laugh over the ridiculous public reaction to this.

I'm in Toronto, one of the areas in North America MOST affected by SARS. The public health officials have repeated until they are blue in the face that there is a VERY VERY low risk of coming into contact with this bug even if you are in Hong Kong, let alone in Toronto.

The main worry is that it is air borne. Otherwise, you would not have even heard of it. As of today there just under 1700 confimed cases worldwide, and less than 60 deaths. Most of the people who have it in Toronto are improving - not dying - so it is obviously not always fatal.

They have not yet confirmed the virus that's responsible for this, but are close. Latest speculation is that it may be two viruses working in concert.

Calm down, wash your hands frequently, and put away the mask unless you are actually visiting a hospital or other area with confirmed SARS cases.

Reportedly it just came into this country via a flight from Asia to San Jose, CA.

That flight was later reported to not have been infected by SARS.

You may find this link to a press conference from the WHO to be very informative on the latest known on SARS.

http://www.who.int/csr/sars/press2003_04_01/en/

Airplanes are one of the most common places to catch SARS. 200-300 passengers packed in like sardines breathing the same recirculated air and using the same bathrooms and touching the same doorknobs, flush handles (yeah right, i doubt if any stewardess will clean and disinfect a flush handle, yet we all use it). And the trip is over 12 hours!!

Any doctor who laughs at SARS is a idiot. SARS is way worse than AIDS. You dont even need to touch someone to get SARS, all they have to do is breath on you. The virus is airborne.

SARS is a mutated form of the Corona virus, the same family of viruses that cause the common cold. But this new mutant strain is superior in its killing ability.

Even doctors die of SARS!

We dont know enough about SARS to say that it is a safe. It is a killer desease. Please take precautions. Being extra safe is better than being extra careless at this point in time. A desease that kills you dead in 2-3 weeks is not something to sneeze at, pardon the pun!

TJ seeker
You are being alarmist and spreading half truths about subjects on which you have little exact knowledge . No one knows the transmission route of SARS. The fellow airline passengers of SARS victims have NOT come down with the disease itself. If that were the case the disease would be MUCH more widespread. As of now it is in isolated pockets only. The original doctor who had the disease transmitted it to 4 other known persons but NOT his own wife or children. The vast majority of people who contract SARS have only a bad upper respiritory illness. It is rarely fatal. Almost all the fatalities are in individuals who are elderly or immunocompromised already by some underlying disease. Having someone " breathe on you " will NOT transmit SARS in the opinion of most experts !!!
I am a physician and while not laughing at SARS, I do not think we should be spreading groundless paranoia about it's " killing effect ".

I agree strongly with Khun Mor, based on the information I have read from authoritative agencies. I will quote from the doctors at the World Health Organization:

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REGARDING TRANSMISSION:
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Dr Klaus Stohr: The epidemiological data that we have from very many places now is not suggesting that this virus would not be transmitted other than with droplets.... – person to person contact – is the major mode of transmission.

...It doesn’t mean, clearly, that it is airborne, otherwise you will have the whole of Hong Kong and other places with vast number of cases......on in-flight transmission, it’s not everybody, it’s people sitting next to or air crew, cabin crew, being in close contact with the patients.

Dr David Heymann: Let me just add that our regional office in Manila has compared this to the Ebola virus. Now this comparison is not a bad comparison because Ebola virus is amplified by poor practices in hospitals. Most outbreaks of Ebola have occurred because hospital workers have become infected and have then infected their family members. This is identical to what we are seeing with the SARS virus. Health workers are becoming infected, that amplifies the transmission, and then they transmit to family members. Neither one of these viruses, as far as we know, can be aerosolized and be transmitted by aerosol, unless it is in a very close area. Or imagine that somebody might mechanically aerosolize in treating a patient, which would send up a fine mist of droplets that might spread to us, that is another possible way. But neither of these viruses transmits easily in the air. They have to be transmitted by close contact. The difference of course is that Ebola is a very fatal disease, with 50–70% of people dying. This disease [SARS] has consistently had 4% dying, which is still a significant number.


REGARDING THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE DISEASE:
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Dr David Heymann: Ninety per cent of people who have gotten this disease, as we understand it today through our group of clinicians, 90% of these people are feeling better and are on the way to recovery at day seven after disease. And they continue to get better and there have been over 50 or 60 who have been discharged from hospitals in Viet Nam and in Hong Kong. Four per cent of people do die, but many of these have had a pre-disposing condition such as diabetes or other disease which has made their immune system to be weakened and not able to fight off this disease.

REGARDING THE RISKS AND PREVENTION:
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Q. Is wearing a mask or any other practical measure effective against the transmission?

A. Dr Guénaël Rodier: I mean, it doesn’t make sense to wear a mask unless you are directly exposed to a case.

Q. As a prevention measure? For example, travelling in a plane or in a lift?

A. Dr Guénaël Rodier: You have to put risk in perspective, I mean, this is one risk, among many others for which you don’t do anything. And frankly if you wear a mask simply because the probability is that you are going to come across somebody who is a case sufficiently long enough, then you put a mask in the morning and you don’t fasten your seat belt in the car, this is upside down. So, again this disease appears by foci. We try to make all efforts possible to identify clearly where are these foci. In Hong Kong, for instance, there have been hospital foci well identified; there’s now this apartment cluster foci identified. And it needs more work to identify exactly where the risk is. And then if you go there with the intention to take care of a patient, for instance, or to visit a patient, yes you should wear a mask.

But I think otherwise, it probably doesn’t make sense, because your risk has to be put into perspective.

Dr David Heymann: Let me try to help a little bit more by saying that in Asia many times, people who have a respiratory infection, a cold, wear a mask in order to protect others. But I must tell you that in common cold, one of the most easy ways of transmitting a common cold from one person to another is through a hand shake which transfers virus from the hand of one person who may have rubbed his nose to another person’s hand and that person then rubs his nose or her nose or touches their mouth, and they get infected. So a mask is not at all a guarantee of protection against any disease, except if it’s a high-filtered mask worn with goggles to protect your eyes, worn with gloves to protect your hands. So if want to really fly and be protected, get yourself goggles, a mask and gloves.

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Granted that there is a still a lot to be learned about this disease, I think you have to do like this doctor says and keep it in perspective with other risks, relative to your factors of exposure and other risk-elevating facors like immuno-related disorders.