Word: influenza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Anxiety over SARS is justified, but it reveals our lack of perspective. SARS has resulted in hundreds of deaths, but tuberculosis kills 5,000 people each day. Malaria causes more than 300 million acute illnesses and 1 million deaths each year. Influenza kills 36,000 Americans annually, and 42,000 Americans die each year in car accidents. Where is the outcry over these deaths, most of which could be prevented through better health care and health education? SAM CHAN Deerfield...
Your article on SARS was informative, but you might have noted that while the Spanish-influenza epidemic of 1918-19 killed more people than died in all of World War I, it disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it came on, within a year, and hasn't been a problem since. Spanish influenza and SARS may have in common a rapidly changing genetic sequence that would cause SARS to hit a biological dead end. I certainly hope it does. RICK JASPER Las Vegas...
...most common route is direct person-to-person contact. Unlike influenza or tuberculosis, SARS is transmitted not through the air but most likely by droplets spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Doctors don't know how long an infected person remains contagious...
...taken seriously, because one individual can infect many others. The major risk factor for acquiring the infection is breathing. In the absence of an effective drug or vaccine, we know that some infectious diseases similarly transmitted by the respiratory route have wreaked havoc: 20-40 million deaths from the influenza pandemic of 1918, the decimation of the population of Hawaii by the first introduction of measles and the lingering epidemic of tuberculosis that afflicts 8 million people annually now. Even with good vaccines, 36,000 people died in the U.S. last year from influenza, and even with good drugs...
There is currently no vaccine for SARS, and its similarity to other common sicknesses such as influenza, combined with a long incubation period of ten days make it difficult to identify and diagnose, Harvard Medical School Professor Kenneth McIntosh ’58 said in an interview earlier this month...