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22-APR-2003 Edu Nividhia

SARS

Museo del Prado (Madrid)

Una nueva enfermedad llamada SARS
SARS es una enfermedad respiratoria causada por el recientemente identificado coronavirus. SARS ha sido reportado por más de 25 países en el mundo.
¿Quién está a riesgo de contraer SARS?
Las personas más a riesgo de contraer SARS son trabajadores de salud que atienden a pacientes con SARS y contacto familiar cercano con esos pacientes. Esas personas deben tomar precauciones específicas para protegerse. Debido a que hay un gran número de casos en ciertas partes del mundo, específicamente China, Hong Kong y Singapur, las personas que visitan esos países se encuentran a un riesgo más alto de exposición.
Síntomas de SARS
La enfermedad usualmente comienza con una fiebre más alta de 100.4º. A veces la fiebre se asocia con escalofríos u otros síntomas que incluyen dolor de cabeza, dolor en el cuerpo y cansancio. Algunas personas pueden también tener síntomas respiratorios leves. Después de tres a siete días, puede que la persona desarrolle una tos seca y que tenga dificultad para respirar.

Extraido de la web http://www.cambridgepublichealth.org/sars/factsheet_sp.html

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comment | share
Beniliam 12-Feb-2005 17:43
Gran gusto para las camaras tiene el oriental, esa minolta 7 es una maravilla tecnologica.
Guest 12-Jan-2004 23:50
MEDICAL DESTRUCTION IN THE WAKE OF SARS

JANUARY 11, 2004. Special offer: volunteer to be diagnosed with a brand new disease caused by a virus that was just isolated for the first time; receive medical treatment; and then ROLL THE DICE.

And oh yes, this “new disease” is actually very old, and if they ever did isolate a virus, it shows no evidence of causing anything. But the drugs they use to treat you are very real, you can be sure of that.

Ha ha. It’s actually one big joke. The laugh, however, is on you.

The disease is SARS. The treatment is steroids, called corticosteroids. Also, a drug called Ribavirin.

Those crazy folk in China actually decided to do follow-ups on patients diagnosed with SARS last year, to see what happened to them. Big mistake. In the medical world it’s much better to forget that phase and just move on to something else.

Here are a few quotes from a Wall St. Journal story that explain what happened when that follow-up was done. ["Drug Cripples SARS Survivors," by Matt Pottinger]

“In China, a debilitating and often irreversible bone disease called avascular necrosis has struck many of the people who were treated for severe acute respiratory syndrome. And the primary cause is one of the main SARS treatments: the corticosteroids that flowed from IV drips into the veins of thousands of patients to prevent them from suffocating because of inflamed lungs.” [Note: many, many of these patients were in no such danger of suffocating; they simply had a case of the flu or a cold.]

“In Beijing, where the problem appears by far the worst in the world, orthopedic surgeons estimate that a third of the city's 2,500 former SARS patients are in the grips of avascular necrosis (also referred to as osteonecrosis). Symptoms typically begin with stiffness or pain in the hip, knee, ankle or shoulder joints and often culminate in the crumbling of those bones, requiring bone grafts or joint replacements. Even in milder cases, people can end up with arthritis bad enough to bring athletic endeavors like running to a lifelong halt.”

“In Beijing, a picture is emerging of a medical system that turned to corticosteroids with zeal bordering on recklessness, according to interviews with intensive-care clinicians, orthopedic surgeons and patients. Hard questions also are being raised in Hong Kong, where the bone disease has appeared in 14 percent of more than 850 former SARS patients who have been screened with magnetic resonance imaging.” [Note: it’s very hard to tell the level of “ corticosteroid zeal” outside China, because, as I say, follow-ups have not been done.]

“In Toronto, Singapore, Taipei, Taiwan, and Hanoi, North Vietnam, health authorities say they are unaware of SARS-related cases of the bone disease, although they haven't done follow-up studies on patients, as Chinese cities are now doing -- a strategy that can catch early signs of a disease that sometimes takes a year or two before causing symptoms.” [Note: early signs of a disease actually means signs of bone destruction from the drug treatment. It’s not a disease, any more than pouring gasoline on your arm and lighting it is a disease.]

“Most doctors say they plan to use steroids if SARS returns, although many of the same doctors admit they are uncertain that the drugs really help, or what the optimal dosage should be if they do.” [Note: very, very reassuring.]

“Clinicians in Beijing say a course of the steroid methylprednisolone routinely lasted more than a month -- twice as long as what doctors said they typically used in Vietnam, Taiwan and Canada. Whereas physicians in Hanoi and Taipei say they gave steroids only to the most serious cases and rarely exceeded cumulative doses of 2,000 milligrams of methylprednisolone, some Beijing hospitals gave the drugs to all SARS patients. Cumulative doses were routinely twice as high and in some cases five times as high. While doctors in Toronto often used cumulative dosages of 3,000-4,000 milligrams -- comparable to what some Beijing doctors prescribed -- they limited the courses to just nine days.” [Note: of course the effects of nine days of steroids in Canada are unknown, because no one is doing patient follow-up.]

“Faith in unproven SARS drugs extended beyond steroids. In a study published in October in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, doctors in Toronto concluded that the widely prescribed antiviral drug ribavirin hurt SARS patients in Canada more than it helped. Ribavirin's toxicity caused doctors to perform blood transfusions on one-third of the Canadian patients who received the drug. Some doctors hypothesize that ribavirin may even magnify the effect of corticosteroids in causing avascular necrosis, because ribavirin destroys red blood cells that carry oxygen to bones.”

End of article excerpts.

Ribavirin destroys red blood cells? Causes very dangerous anemias? Yes. But they use it anyway. ONE-THIRD OF THE CANADIAN PATIENTS TREATED WITH RIBAVIRIN HAD TO HAVE BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS TO REPLACE DESTROYED RED BLOOD CELLS.

“Uh, Mr. Jones? That cough you have, and the fatigue? It’s really SARS. We have a very special drug for that. It’s like applying an atomic bomb to deal with a truant schoolboy.”

Perhaps some of my friends in Canada will see this as an opportunity to revive that class-action law suit that ended up dead in the water last year. It’ll have a somewhat different slant, but it’ll wake some people up.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com