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Cover Story

World Health Organization proven wrong about airborne SaRS

by Judi McLeod, Editor,
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

When SaRS was on the wane, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that it was an airborne virus.

WHO got it wrong.

a new Toronto study has found evidence that the SaRS virus may spread through the air. That means SaRS spreads not just through human contact, making it far more contagious than was previously thought.

Before SaRS ran its gamut in 2003, about 8,098 people in 29 countries contracted the deadly virus, with 774 of them dying. Included in the SaRS fatalities were 44 in the Toronto area.

Scientists agree that admitting that a virus is airborne runs the risk of pushing the public panic button.

The newly released Toronto study cautions that just because the virus is in the air doesn't constitute proof that it spreads that way. although it has been suspected, there is no documented case of a patient getting airborne SaRS anywhere.

During the 2003 SaRS scare, strict infection-control precautions were ordered in all hospitals. Hospital visitors could not visit patients without wearing facemasks, and the public at large was put on hand wash alert.

But in spite of all infection-control measures, health-care workers continued to fall ill from SaRS, leading researchers to speculate by what other means SaRS could be spreading.

Until now, researchers have maintained that the virus spreads only through direct contact with infected water droplets, of the kind that come from human coughs.

The study now identifies secure acute respiratory syndrome as an "opportunistic airborne infection", in the same league as the common cold.

In their testing, scientists detected the SaRS coronavirus in the air in one of four hospital rooms that was occupied by patients with the disease, says the study published in the May issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, released last week by the Infectious Diseases Society of america.

That could explain how air travelers in asia and people in adjacent apartment buildings in Hong Kong contracted it even though they had no direct contact, said Timothy Booth, a virologist at the Public Health agency of Canada laboratory in Winnipeg, who led the study.

"It does show SaRS is in the air and if you're in the same room with a patient, you might get enough to infect you if you were not wearing a mask," Booth said.

It is now "beyond doubt" that SaRS can spread through breathing the same air as a patient.

The news that SaRS is an airborne virus is bound to further undermine public confidence in WHO, whose brass concluded it was not.

Malaria increased under WHO's Roll Back Malaria Project, although WHO promised six years ago to halve it.

WHO is the global organization in charge of response to what it is now calling an "inevitable" world pandemic of avian Flu.


Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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