A new type of atypical pneumonia dubbed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome continues to spread globally, with 1,316 cases and 48 deaths reported so far, most of them in China and Hong Kong. Despite the fact that health care professionals are practicing rigorous isolation techniques when they treat known or suspected victims, the disease is causing tens of new victims to fall gravely ill every day. It’s now clear that early guesses about the pathogen’s infectiousness were too optimistic, and that means more stringent measures to contain the outbreak are now justified.

Yesterday, doctors in Hong Kong announced that 14 people in one apartment block appear to have contracted SARS from another resident, who in turn got the disease from visiting his brother in hospital. The new victims live on different floors, meaning that they probably got the disease by inhaling small amounts of virus in airborne water droplets, perhaps left in the air by the “index patient” when he coughed in the building’s elevators or lobby.

Are you terrified yet?

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00414.html

This SARS disease is fucking scary. The latest scoop from USA Today. The one beef I have with this article is it claims “it is not contagious if protective measures are used.” Yeah, right. Most of its victims have been doctors and nurses. Not the kind of people to take chances with germs.

I read yesterday that seven people caught SARS simply by flying in the same airplane as one of its victims. That’s right – just by being in the same airplane.

Here are some more links about the disease: one from the Center for Disease Control, and more links from Google News.

If the Smirker’s War wasn’t chewing up headlines, this disease would have people heading for the hills. I think Kelly and I will put off visiting our friends the Hibbles in Australia this year. 🙁

It is almost too late to celebrate it, but it was twenty years ago this month that my family and I first arrived in North Carolina.

It was 1983 when we moved into a house in Charlotte so big that another kid on the school bus asked me how many families lived there with us. He was serious, though the house wasn’t as big as that.

Jim Valvano’s Cardiac Pack had just won the NCAA basketball championship and his goofy grin was all over the local television advertising.

Charlotte was also primed for major growth as Bank of America (nee Nationsbank) was still North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) and still strictly local. Jim Hunt was governor and was reeling in business for his home state.

IBM made printers and ATM machines in a nearby office park. The IBM PC was barely two years old, and ours was one year old. I called my first BBS (bulletin board system) that year, beginning a long career in computer communications. It was there I began to call myself “IBMark” in the online forums.

The move to North Carolina was very good for our family, and to me in particular. I’ll always remember how at home I felt when I got here. Twenty years later and I still don’t want to leave!