Medical Alert

First of two parts

Doctors, scientists and public health officials across the nation went into overdrive within hours of the World Health Organization’s first global alert on SARS, the deadly new virus from Asia. The word went out over phone trees, blast faxes, BlackBerry alerts, e-mail. And inside 24 hours, the U.S. public health system stood ready to tackle SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — as it became the world’s latest “emerging disease.”

The speed of the response illustrates how much has changed since the September 11 attacks and the anthrax-in-the-mail mystery that followed.

“The relevant U.S. agencies must be given credit. The United States is much better prepared today than we were two years ago to respond to a full-blown terrorist attack,” says Richard Fischer, senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation think tank in Washington, who writes extensively on China and published a paper, asking “what if SARS were a bioweapon?”

Sixty-eight persons in the United States have been identified as “probable” cases of the disease, which is characterized by high fever, coughing and contact with someone who recently visited Asia.

Worldwide, more than 8,400 cases of SARS have been diagnosed. Of 779 reported deaths, all but 55 were in China or Hong Kong. No U.S. deaths from SARS have been reported; 31 have died in Canada.

No authority has suggested that SARS is in any way connected to bioterrorism.

However, the outbreak proved to be an ideal test for the ability to cope with a fast-moving, communicable disease — the kind of pathogen that terrorists would love to weaponize.

“From a response perspective, there is not much difference between what we have to do if Mother Nature or a terrorist” introduces a disease, says David Heyman, biological terrorism specialist at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The letters containing anthrax infected 23 and killed five, including two postal workers from Prince George’s County. It took several weeks for doctors to understand the bacterial infection they faced.

‘A long way to go’

With SARS, the pieces were in place to meet a new disease head-on.

“SARS shows that we now have a heightened level of awareness and a much more robust communications system,” Mr. Heyman says. “Things are better today than they were at 9/11, but we have a long way to go.”

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