Canada’s Pooch Squeals During Screwing
More than 6,400 people, including 2,000 from the school, are now in quarantine in greater Toronto after Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome resurfaced six days ago.
Before then, Toronto had thought it had beaten the disease — no new cases were reported from mid-April to mid-May.
Health officials said a student at the school, located just north of Toronto, appeared to have symptoms of SARS, and that prompted the quarantine call. One of the student’s parents worked at Toronto’s North York General Hospital, epicenter of the latest outbreak.
“The risk of getting SARS in this kind of setting (a school) is very low,” said Dr. Murray McQuigge, a physician in the region where the high school is located.
“We are not aware of any other student in this school who is symptomatic right now.”
The Toronto area is the only place outside Asia where people have died of SARS. There have been 27 deaths around Toronto and there are 12 probable cases now.
Doctors say six patients are in critical condition and they are monitoring about 30 more people for infection.
“In retrospect, we think we let our guard down too early,” said Dr. Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the leaders in Toronto’s fight against SARS.
Doctors think the virus lingered in hospital wards for weeks and infected nurses, patients and visitors after the authorities eased rules on wearing masks and gloves.
Nurses this week said they had noticed patients with SARS-like symptoms after the rules were relaxed, but doctors and hospital administrators did not listen.
“Unfortunately, they were not taken seriously,” Doris Grinspun, executive director of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, told Reuters, describing it as “ridiculous” that no one paid attention. From Yahoo News
Let’s see. In a city that just was recovering from a SARS scare and multiple shutdowns of hospitals and thousands of people quarantined… an elderly person lay in a hospital being treated for a respiratory problem and the thought of SARS occurred to no one. The problem spread to several other hospitals, and the index patient (very elderly and frail, died.
If it were smallpox, wouldn’t every rash be first evaluated as smallpox before going on to another diagnosis? How come respiratory problems in populations known to be easily infected with SARS weren’t looked at for SARS? Dumb, dumb, dumb!
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