Juba wrote to his mum in the UK: “That must be why Britain had an empire and Taiwan didn’t!”
That surely explains it.
People in the UK don’t have “moms.” They have mums, mummies mothers, mas or maters.
Interesting hypothesis:
SARS’ origins may lie in China’s exotic cuisine
Shunde, China – An hour south of Guangzhou, the Dongyuan animal market presents endless opportunities for an emerging germ. In hundreds of cramped stalls that stink of blood and guts, wholesale food vendors tend to veritable zoos that will grace Guangdong province’s tables: snakes, chickens, cats, turtles, badgers, frogs. And, in summer, sometimes rats, too.
They are stacked, one on top of another, in cages that in turn serve as seats, card tables and dining quarters for the poor migrants who work there. On a recent morning, near stall 17, there were beheaded snakes, disemboweled frogs and feathers flying as a half-alive headless bird was plunked into a basket.
If you were a corona virus, like the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, it would be easy to move from animals to humans in the kitchens and food stalls of Guangdong, a province notorious for exotic cuisine prepared with freshly killed beasts.
Indeed, preliminary studies of early SARS victims here in Guangdong have found that an unusually high percentage were in the catering profession – a tantalizing clue, perhaps, to how a germ that genetically most resembles viruses that affect chickens and rodents has gained the ability to infect thousands of humans.
Continued at:
new word: biopreparedness
[I guess it didn’t take long for the book deals to start coming in to London and New York re the SARS story. Just read that the Hong Kong-based editor of TIME Asia, Karl Taro Greenfeld, is writing a book on SARS, with reporting from all over the world on both front-line treatment and leading-edge research in the race for a vaccine, along with a blueprint for how the world’s medical, scientific, and political communities will approach the increasingly critical issue of biopreparedness in the future, and it will be published in the spring of 2004. That is, if there are some living readers around to still read it…]
Well I was wrong - The WHO has been to Shanghai and the incidence of SARS did not increase 10 fold. It increased 3 fold in Beijing while they were here:) Maybe Shanghai has more Ambulances and empty Hotel rooms? But I guess that it has to be better here in Shanghai - no matter how hard they work to hide it.
My wife has insisted that I stop swimming and I am not sure whether to go out or how far.
IKEA opened an enormous store across the road - attracted 1000’s - what if one was a SARS carrier???
Just now the smog looks more dangerous than SARS - visibility is about 3km
This SARS thing has spawned forums now. This Forum really takes the cake. Not just a clever name, it really is SO SICK!
I think I know where the flamers from Tealit and the banned from forumosa have gone. One again This Forum sucks so much that I didn’t even bother to post and tell them how pathetic their site is.
That’s what my wife thinks.
Someone mentioned swimming. Can anyone think of any reason why swimming might be a dangerous activity if there’s SARS about.
(PS typing this message because my afternoon elementary school classes have been delayed while they have a meeting to talk about SARS. Rumour is that they might shut the school. Could be to do with the fact that one of my students is in house quarantine while her Dad’s in Heping Hospital.)
Brian
I dunno, but I thought this whole thing reaked of panic before and it appears that it might be just that. Not that governments shouldn’t be taking pracautions, but with the numbers that are out there now, it’s a little early to be shouting that the sky is falling.
I’m finding numerous articles by “health officials” that puts things into perspective. 326 people (or something or another) dead worldwide… a cause for concern, yes. But, people are going a little overboard (at this point).
WHO basically says Vietnam has it contained, and the same for Toronto and Hong Kong. China seems to be the only place with a cause for real concern, if only because of the panic instilled in everyone. Though, India was SARS cases now and they could face some of the same problems that China has in trying to control its spread.
Perhaps some good will come of all this. I don’t know if this is true but some Taiwanese friends told me that the first case of SARS was traced back to some food stall, or market somewher on the mainland… whether it’s true or not, the fact that that is the rumored origin of the disease, people in China and Taiwan might think twice about some of the more unhygenic practices that are involved in preparing and serving food.
But you did help them out by posting hyperlinks to their web site, which is what any webmaster really wants, as you know. The site seems be based in Hong Kong, with plenty of Cantonisms in the Chinese posts.
…
I can’t see what could be dangerous about swimming - the locker room, maybe, rather than the heavily chlorinated pool. How about chopsticks? Prime virus vector suspect, I should think.
…
Oh my god, the secretary is sneezing. We’re all doomed, DOOMED I tell you!
But you did help them out by posting hyperlinks to their web site, which is what any webmaster really wants, as you know. The site seems be based in Hong Kong, with plenty of Cantonisms in the Chinese posts.
…
I can’t see what could be dangerous about swimming - the locker room, maybe, rather than the heavily chlorinated pool. How about chopsticks? Prime virus vector suspect, I should think.
…
Oh my god, the secretary is sneezing. We’re all doomed, DOOMED I tell you![/quote]
Is this going to get into a pot pissing contest over the typo in my post? Quote me but don’t correct my typo, it’s what makes me unique. 
Hyperlink - well, I don’t care about that - it still sucks
What is being covered up is that people are not dying from SARS at all (not that SARs has been proven to exist in the first place…)
Take Yesterdays and Todays Taipei times as an example.
Yesterday 28 April 2003: Headline: DOH confirms first SARS death, ruins national record.
But well down into the article (does anyone actually read them?) it says: Tseng died around 10.10pm Saturday night from bacterial septicemia and multiple organ failure… " The bacterial infection is blamed on the ‘intubation operation’ used to insert the respirator tube.
In todays media he is presented as having died of SARS - no questions asked.
And still, after at least 6 weeks xyzv number of cases consisting of x suspected, y probable, z confirmed as not SARS and v yet to be tested…
How can any of you suggest that SARS exists at all, or that it actually constitutes a new threat.
Everyday more people die from side effects of treatment, suicide etc and the economy sinks to ever lower levels. Please try to bring some real logic into this debate. Ask the right questions and get the journalists to ask the right questions…
Impossible task. There are no journalists working here. All you have are people carrying mini-recorders who take statements and dutifully type them up verbatim as “reporting.” The idea of actually asking a question very rarely crosses what passes for their minds. Stick to the WHO and CDC websites for your SARS info.
I’m beginning to think along those lines too … how many times have I read “SARS virus” in media reports. As far as I know, there is no virus associated with SARS, except a postulated new coronavirus, which, for some reason, researchers examining tissue samples from “victims” are finding hard to locate. That seems rather odd, as you’d expect a victim’s tissues to be positively teeming with the things … right?
Every report I read about SARS these days seems to confirm the logic of the SARS skeptics and I’m guessing the scaremongers out there who started this whole farce in the first place are wasting time trying to find ways to save face instead of facing up to the real facts that certainly undermine their “SARS theories.”
As an earlier posted asked, going to a local swimming pool with SARS around sounds dangerous to me, since if someone who had or has SARS used the pool or exercise equipment recently, then the virus would be present possibly in the water and on gym stuff and lockers. for now i would say DONT GO NEAR THE WATER. Ocean and lakes and rivers okay, but not community swimming pools. same goes for saunas. stay out.
I do have a question though: why in the world would the Hoping Hospital people send 4 patients with SARS to a hospital in Hsinchu (where according to TV news they were turned back and not allowed in)? I mean, i see the need for Hoping to move some patients out, since they can’t care for all of them, but why move 4 to Hsinchu where the SARS virus has not surfaced yet, and where if they allowed the Hoping patients in, it might surface?
Is there some medical sense to infecting Hsinchu or is this just Keystone Kops on a grand pathetic scale?
The mayor of Hsinchu now faces arrest for his actions!
Everything i said in the last few weeks is coming true now, right? Are any of my predictions from the last few weeks off course? It’s not that I could SEE the future, i have no powers for that. It’s just that I could sense this coming, we all could I think. We all just reacted in different ways.
Me, being a neurotic nincompoop, I freaked out. Sorry about that. But now let’s work together to beat this thing. It’s gonna take a concerted effort on all our parts …
I’ve stopped freaking out. I am serious now.
It is all overblown paranoia… I heard on the BBC that 3000 people die a day of malaria. But we don’t hear about that on the news because they are dying in the poor, backwards quarters of the world… Because SARS has “hit” the developed, richer cities, that’s why it’s all overblown…
The radio report added, too, that you have about a 1 in 400 chance of dying of SARS – if you actually catch it, and they aren’t really good a diagnosing it; in fact, a lot of the so-called cases of SARS are probably not actual SARS cases at all, but only diseases that show similar symptoms…
Hmm, well, worry if you like, but I’m not. Does anybody realize how many people died after the first world war? Millions. My father lost three siblings to that influenza epidemic… They had no control, communication or cure… Now, we have more than enough science and media to keep everyone happy and scared both!
Worry, worry, blab, blab, but I’m not going to give a second thought to all this nonsense…
Yes but malaria (which many scientists, not drug companies are working to find a vaccine for) will only affect tropical regions of the world and you can take drugs to treat it. SARS is the only new exotic virus which can be transmitted person to person and has the ‘potential’ to infect the whole world at the same time so causing a massive domino effect on health services and economies.
It’s weird public opinion on SARS. If you read the papers a few days ago in Taiwan it would seem it was curtains for us. It was taking off in Taiwan and China , Canada etc. I went to Warner Bros cinema complex on sat. and sun. and the whole place was a ghost town, amazing. (In the middle of this Hoping hospital controversy)
Now Vietnam is controlled and people are reading these ‘sars paranoia’ websites and they begin to think it’s all nonsense.
SARS could still kill millions of people. In africa, china, india and some in the developed world. It looks like its controllable if you follow stringent measures. However if it is latent in china it will still cause major panics in the next couple of years because re-infections will occur from chinese travelling around the world.
Also it still has the potential to mutate regularly so it’s difficult to know. If you follow the history of the 1918 epidemic it is strongly suggested that a less virulent form had been spreading for a year or so before the epidemic suddenly became very virulent , most likely as a result of a mutation in the flu virus.
Still the news from Canada and Vietnam is encouraging so it may be controllable but it also could be here to stay. Things are looking better than they did last week. Dont follow the local reporting because as other posters have noted it’s absolute crap, that’s why people are trying to jump thru windows and hang themselves (very emotional lot the Taiwanese).
What can we do, exactly, besides lots of Hand-washing and Not Going Anywhere?
If you think that SARS could kill millions, I don’t think you understand what it is… You have been watching too many bad American movies like Virus… I saw richard gere last night, waiting to be defibrilated in the mothman flick: “But what are these THINGS?!” They’re sluts Richard, waiting to suck ya’ off…
Here is something you don’t need to do:
U.S. Centers for Disease Control
(cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/faq.htm#personal)
What if I must travel to a country where there is community spread of SARS? What precautions can I take?
As with all infectious illnesses, the first line of defense is careful hand hygiene. As a general rule, it is good practice to wash hands frequently with soap and water; if hands are not visibly soiled, alcohol-based hand rubs may be used as an alternative.
To minimize the possibility of infection, you may wish to avoid close contact with large numbers of people as much as possible. CDC does not recommend the routine use of masks while in public areas.
Indeed yes, you run a very high risk of drowning if you do it wrong.