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Journalism of Courage
The death rate from SARS is substantially higher than many experts had previously believed, reaching 13.2 per cent among young and middle-aged people and as high as 55 per cent among those over 60, according to the first major study of patients.
An international team of researchers studied the first 1,425 SARS patients in Hong Kong to reach the findings, published online on Tuesday by the international medical journal the Lancet.
| • HK reports another 11 deaths, eight new cases • Two more dead in Taiwan • China reports 159 new cases, five more deaths • Fear that the SARS virus can be spread by dogs and cats is driving hundreds of people in Beijing to abandon or even kill their pets. Household pets came under scrutiny after the WHO blamed SARS on a new form of the coronavirus, which causes the common cold and probably jumped to man from animals. |
‘‘I’m not surprised that it is higher among elderly people,’’ said Dr Arthur Rheingold of the University of California, Berkeley. ‘‘We would expect that for any respiratory disease, but 55 pc is quite alarming.’’
For comparison, the normal mortality rate for pneumonia caused by other viruses and bacteria is just under 11 per cent overall, with a higher rate among the elderly. Smallpox kills nearly a third of its victims, anthrax can kill more than half, and AIDS can kill nearly all. Influenza kills less than 1 per cent of its victims, but it is much more readily transmitted from person to person.
Two other, smaller studies released on Tuesday found somewhat different results, suggesting that the course of the disease can be highly variable. A study of the first 144 SARS patients in Toronto released online by the Journal of the American Medical Association found an overall death rate of 6.5 per cent, but noted that the risk of death was three times as high for patients with diabetes and 2.5 times as high for those with other serious conditions.
And a study by physicians at Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore of the first 20 patients there showed an overall death rate of 16.7 per cent. The World Health Organisation had initially reported that the death rate from SARS was about 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent, but infectious-disease experts have always considered such low numbers an unrealistic artifact of the way WHO calculated the numbers.
In essence, WHO simply counted the number of deaths and divided that by the number of cases, said epidemiologist Lone Simonsen of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. ‘‘It takes at least 10 days to die of a SARS infection,’’ she said. ‘‘So there is a lag factor that has not been factored into the calculations.’’
The study was conducted by a team led by Dr. Roy Anderson of Imperial College London, and included physicians from Hong Kong University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong health authorities.
Anderson cautioned that the findings were based on hospital admissions. If there are substantial numbers of people who contracted the virus without developing symptoms or did not get sick enough to enter the hospital, the actual death rate could be lower. (LAT-WP)
