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| Last updated at 1:37 AM on 03/06/07 |
Disease of the moment 
The Telegram
Momentum in the news business is a funny thing. One minute a story dominates the agenda, hogging the front page, leading the newscasts.
Then suddenly it’s gone — sent mysteriously to play on the back pages along with the horoscopes and want ads.
We got an example of the phenomenon last week with stories about contagious diseases.
Short months ago, contagion ruled the airwaves in the form of stories about bird flu — a scourge that would bring the world to a hacking halt.
Grocery store shelves would empty, transportation would crawl, emergency wards would go unstaffed as millions succumbed to avian influenza.
The looming crisis took on something of a sporting tone as stories breathlessly reported the latest death-by-chicken statistics from points east.
Week by week, the threat drew closer, with infected birds showing up in Greece, Germany, Great Britain …
And then the story fell off the front page, going to dwell amongst the cricket scores and auto recalls on D18.
Guess who’s back?
Well, not bird flu specifically — though it never went away. But contagion in general, big time.
First there were stories about mumps in Nova Scotia afflicting university students. Seems the mumps vaccine was given to young people only once for several years in the 1980s and ’90s, as medical practitioners opted against giving booster shots.
Without the booster, immunity waned as kids grew older, until conditions were ripe for an outbreak.
Just as mumps was giving a lesson on how old diseases return, a new disease offered a glimpse of dangers in the jet age.
The disease is called XDR-tuberculosis, a virulent form of TB which is particularly deadly and resistant to existing treatments.
On May 24, a man with the disease flew on a jetliner from Rome to Prague, then on to Montreal. Although everyone on board is a potential victim — for instance, if the infected man sneezed on them — authorities are most concerned about contacting passengers who were seated nearby.
Almost as alarming as the disease itself is the inadequacy of government controls to contain it.
Consider this: the man — an American newlywed travelling on his honeymoon — was contacted by U.S. authorities in Rome, who told him he had the disease and should turn himself in to Italian health authorities.
Instead, he boarded a non-U.S. airline in Rome and flew to Canada, before renting a car and driving into the U.S.
U.S. authorities had placed his name on an American no-fly list, but had shared that list with no one else, including Canada.
It’s almost beyond belief that in our post-SARS, post-9/11 world, we don’t have a computerized warning system to prevent an infected individual from boarding a plane.
You’ll no doubt be reading a lot about the issue for the next few days, before it falls off the front page once again.
But it’ll be back, bigger and badder than ever.
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03/06/07
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