Henry, I dare say a lot of people died, not from sars, but from secondary bacterial infections which could have been treated with antibiotics.
Doctors are so imbued with the idea that antibiotics are over-prescribed and that's causing bug immunities to develop, and that viruses such as sars don't respond anyway, that they are failing to identify times when antibiotics are essential.
In NZ, we regularly have deaths from meningitis where doctors have neglected symptoms and assumed it's a sniffle or some such, which they know won't respond to antibiotics. Meningitis is virulently damaging and fatal yet it's often mismanaged. Even when treatment is given, it's delayed by unnecessary minutes so the bugs get a free pass to do a lot of damage before they are killed.
The same effect will happen with sars. Doctors will, eventually, figure out that somebody has sars. Which they will then treat by running a mile to avoid their own demise, while telling the patient that antibiotics won't help because it's a virus.
Another popular treatment by doctors is 'reassurance', which always strikes me as a particularly patronizing 'treatment', especially when the patient thinks the doctor hasn't got a clue and is subsequently proved correct.
An infant of ours [the 4th so we'd seen a lot of poop] had a gross diarrhoea which lasted weeks. The doctor thought we were 'worrying parents' [we went to him early on]. I'd never seen [or smelled] such liquid poop. I saw he wrote "reassured worrying parents". That was the treatment.
In my teens, I'd regularly get bacterial infections subsequent to colds and coughs and end up coughing for weeks. In the worst instance, the doctor reassured me. A couple of days later I phoned back and asked whether now that I was coughing up blood it would be worth doing something. An injection of penicillin did the trick in hours [in terms of feeling some improvement] but bad luck for the destroyed lung tissue [and me].
I suspect the problem was subclinical vitamin C deficiency or some such dietary lack, combined with house mite allergy, wool allergy, a young immune system not used to the various bugs and maybe something else too.
I have a scar on an eyelid where the doctor reassured me, but the bugs which were obviously not worried by that treatment and started climbing across my face. The next visit got the treatment which should have been given in the early stage. But at least the doctor got two extorquerationate fees instead of one.
Anyway, if I get sars, I'll be eating all the antibiotics I can get my hands on and to hell with the possible immunity of the bugs which might survive the onslaught. Sars is bad enough without opportunistic free-rider infections which will give the coup de grace.
The Toronto doctors' incompetence over sars killed a bunch of people. I wonder how many could have been saved with a AC-130H Spectre firing antibiotics at 6000 rounds a minute. home.att.net
Mqurice
PS: I've got some better medical "misadventure" stories but they weren't bacterial in nature. |
