SARS Hits Home
Doctors are scrambling to figure out what the mystery germ is and how to fight it
A month ago it would have been no big deal to find a kid who was afraid of going to the dentist. But Andrew Rankin's fear is new, and deep. It's prompted by SARS, the strange and powerful new illness that has killed more than 270 people worldwide.
When he visited the dentist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children last Wednesday, 9-year-old Andrew was met at the hospital door by a nurse in mask, gown, and gloves who asked whether he had a cough or a fever. He had to put on a mask himself, then wash his hands with an alcohol gel. He didn't mind. "He didn't want to come today," said his mother, Kelly Rankin. "SARS was the part that terrified him the most"--more than dentistry, more even than the heart surgery that had been scheduled for April 24 but was postponed because SARS has forced the hospital to cancel all elective surgery.
This is life in the age of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, when a routine dental visit becomes a test of gumption. In the last month, no part of Toronto life has been untouched by the city's battle against SARS, from doctors' offices and schools and churches to popular Asian restaurants like Mandarin, which now advertises on the radio that its staff is SARS free. More than 7,000 people have been quarantined in their homes or in hospitals. "The problem is here to stay," Paul Gully, Canada's senior director general of population and public health, told Canadians last week. "We have to learn to live with it."
Still, residents of Toronto were stunned last Wednesday when the World Health Organization told people to avoid traveling to Toronto because of the risk of SARS, which has spread to 26 countries since it first surfaced in China last fall. That made Canada's largest city, the engine of one fifth of its economy, the only Western Hemisphere city on an unprecedented "do not visit" list that includes parts of China and Hong Kong, which have had the bulk of the world's SARS cases. "One of the most important means of spreading diseases around the globe is air travel," said David Heymann, director of communicable diseases for WHO, noting that travelers appeared to be carrying SARS from Toronto to other countries. "We still do not know whether or not we can stop this disease from becoming endemic."
Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which earlier in the week had advised Americans to stay out of Toronto hospitals and wash their hands carefully if in town, said that the WHO action went too far. Other public-health experts suggested that WHO had listed Toronto in order to mollify China, which has come under harsh criticism for its reluctance to reveal the extent of SARS infections there. "Suffice to say, we didn't find their scientific arguments convincing," says Colin D'Cunha, Ontario's commissioner of public health.
"Pariah City." But normally phlegmatic Torontonians were rattled to see their town branded, as one local tabloid put it, "Pariah City." "I find it very stressful here now," said Judy Cutler, public relations director for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons. "I think people are realizing it's serious."
advertisement
