Sunday, March 30, 2003 From <a href=www2.ocregister.com>OCRegister news services

Two Buffalo Sabres players were under observation Saturday after possibly being exposed to a mysterious and potentially deadly respiratory illness.

Defensemen Rhett Warrener and Brian Campbell, who played in the Sabres' 4-1 victory over Montreal on Friday, did not travel with the team for its game at Carolina on Saturday.

Erie County (N.Y.) Health Commissioner Anthony Billittier recommended the players remain isolated - but not quarantined - for 10 days, effectively ending their season because the Sabres play their last game April 6.

Team spokesman Mike Gilbert said the decision to hold the players back was a precaution, and that neither has shown any signs of being infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. It was determined that there was what Gilbert called "a remote chance" that the players had limited exposure to the virus after a female relative of Campbell's visited them Monday. The players are roommates.

The relative, who lives in Toronto, was exposed at her job as a hospital worker in Ontario and was hospitalized after showing symptoms Friday, Billittier said.

Warrener said he and Campbell were feeling well and were not very concerned.

C B C . C A   N e w s  Written by CBC News Online staff Last Updated Mon Mar 31 14:21:44 2003

HONG KONG-- Health authorities in Hong Kong quarantined a 33-storey apartment building in the Amoy Gardens complex on Monday because of the number of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cases there.

The decision was denounced as political by Leung Ping-chung, a medical professor who has been monitoring the spread of the atypical pneumonia through the staff of a hospital in Hong Kong.

"If isolation is effective to control the spread of the disease, we can say this decision came too late," he said. "And who can say for sure who should be isolated?"

Over the weekend, 58 of the 105 new SARS cases reported in Hong Kong were found in Block E of the Amoy Gardens complex.

Of the 213 people in the complex with SARS, 107 live in Block E, the World Health Organization said Monday.

Police sealed the building where about 240 people will have to stay for 10 days.

Hong Kong is the location of the second-largest outbreak of the disease, after China, but ahead of Canada, where Health Canada on Sunday reported 98 probable or suspected cases.

• FROM MARCH 30, 2003: Fourth SARS death reported in Toronto

Four people have died in Canada.

Researchers expect to identify the virus that causes SARS in "at most a few weeks," Hitosho Oshitani, the World Health Organization's SARS co-ordinator, said Monday.

He called the disease "the most significant outbreak that has been spread through air travel in history."

WHO said Monday that there are 1,622 known cases, and 58 deaths. That's up by 72 and 4, respectively, since Saturday, when the previous WHO report was released.

<a href=www.20minutos.es>20 minutos Barcelona

Actualitzada el 03/04/2003 a les 23:54(CET)

Ha salido de la nada; mata a menos del 10% de los afectados, y apenas conocemos qué la causa. La misteriosa y grave neumonía detectada en Hong Kong, Vietnam y China se contagia con relativa facilidad con la cercanía a personas afectadas, cursa con fiebre intensa y dolores articulares (como una gripe) y causa una severa inundación de los pulmones con fluido (neumonía) que exige cuidado hospitalario. Poco más se sabe de ella, excepto que la cifra total de víctimas mortales por el virus asciende ya a 75 y los infectados son 2.300 en todo el mundo.

Hasta hace poco se desconocía su agente causante, que ha resultado ser un virus. Se conoce por SRAS: Síndrome Respiratorio Agudo Severo. Y debe preocupar, pero dentro de un orden.

El Ministerio de Sanidad explica en su página web todo lo referente a esta enfermedad y la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) ofrece día a día la actualidad en torno a esta enfermedad.

¿Debo alarmarme?

Sólo si se dan varios factores al mismo tiempo: la presencia de fiebre alta (>38ºC) con problemas respiratorios como tos, disnea o dificultad respiratoria son la primera pista. Pero estos síntomas son comunes a muchas enfermedades respiratorias leves como catarros o gripes; la sospecha de SARS tan sólo procede en el caso de personas que o bien han tenido contacto con un diagnosticado de SARS, o bien acaban de regresar de las zonas afectadas (China, Indonesia, Filipinas, Singapur, Tailandia y Vietnam). Todos los casos registrados fuera de esas áreas (Canadá, Suiza, Alemania) afectan a  personas que acaban de regresar de Asia.

Si cumple estos requisitos póngase en contacto con el 112, donde le informarán del centro médico al que debe dirigirse.

El contagio parece depender de gotas en suspensión, como las que se forman al toser o estornudar los pacientes, por lo que pueden tomarse las precauciones lógicas para evitar contagios respiratorios. El Ministerio de Sanidad recomienda posponer los viajes a las áreas afectadas (especialmente Hong Kong y Hanoi, en China), cuando sea posible.

• Página sobre SRAS del Ministerio de Sanidad español
• Notas de prensa del Ministerio de Sanidad español

Noticias relacionadas:

• La nueva neumonía se ha extendido ya por 16 países. -Otros cuatro muertos por neumonía. -Peor que el ébola. -Un muerto y 60 nuevos casos de neumonía atípica al día. -La neumonía atípica se dispara en Asia. -Detectado el primer caso de neumonía atípica en Francia. -Ya son diez las víctimas por neumonía atípica en Hong Kong. -Identificado el virus que causa la nueva neumonía. -Posible caso en Badajoz de la nueva neumonía. -Sanidad alerta a los aeropuertos de la nueva neumonía atípica. -Un brote de neumonía atípica de origen asiático alarma a Europa y EE UU.

<a href=www.thestar.com>Toronto Star Sun Apr 6, 2003 | Updated at 12:42 PM Apr. 6, 2003. 12:44 PM DAVID OLIVE COLUMNIST

"We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world." —U.S. senator Albert Beveridge (R-Ind.) in 1900, in reference to America's justification for crushing a Filipino rebellion against the U.S. military government in Manila.

The rock throwers who took to the streets of Seattle in the late 1990s to curb the pace of globalization may yet realize their dream.

The crisis in diplomacy over the Iraq war has already thrown globalization into reverse gear. And the ultimate disintegration of the global economy, if it should come to that, will be traced to an unlikely ally of the anti-globalization movement.

George W. Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes at "rogue nations" suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction and harbouring terrorists is more far-reaching in its consequences than even its detractors yet realize.

Logically, the projection of unfettered U.S. power around the globe in pursuit of the American president's national-security objectives will require that the world's lone superpower assume many roles in global governance now filled by post-World War II international bodies that the United States no longer trusts. It will force America to micro-manage the world economy and the activities of multinational corporations lest they abet real or perceived U.S. enemies.

"Boosters of corporate-led globalization should understand that their vision of a new world order is fundamentally incompatible with George W. Bush's," writes William Greider in the current issue of The Nation, a left-leaning U.S. journal not generally regarded as a hand-holder of capitalists. Greider's reasoning is that if the United States now proposes to strike pre-emptively at nations, it will show little hesitation in striking at companies or whole industries that don't readily fall in line with Bush's more robust definition of Pax Americana.

The Bush Doctrine of unprovoked intervention and crass, unilateral pursuit of national self-interest repudiates half a century of American-led global growth in free trade, free movement of labour, more rapid exchange of intellectual property and promotion of "transnational" corporations.

In its first year alone, the Bush administration withdrew from five international treaties, and repudiated Clinton-era diplomatic initiatives spanning the globe from North Korea to the Middle East.

And that was before the recent showdown at the United Nations over Iraq, in which the United States undermined the authority of an organization that co-ordinates everything from global humanitarian aid and technical standards for industry to agricultural management and postal conventions.

Until now, the ugly face of globalization has been sweatshops in the developing world, capricious Western bankers dictating harsh economic policies to disadvantaged nations, and the dumping of under-priced Western agricultural goods in Third World markets where local producers are forced off their land.

Now add to that a spectre that threatens global business executives.

In its campaign to neutralize real and perceived threats to its security, the United States will at least to some degree have to abandon its free-market instincts.

At a minimum, Bush will likely see the need to more strictly police the international trade in "defence-sensitive" materials, applying new regulatory controls on the multinational corporations from which Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan and India buy their weapons and the seemingly innocent "dual-use" materials that can be converted into weapons.

The definition of "defence-sensitive" is open-ended. The notorious aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein were useful both for irrigation projects and as sheathes for nuclear-weapon projectiles.

Defence-sensitive could now embrace everything from crop dusters to fertilizer for making Timothy McVeigh-type truck bombs to sophisticated video-game components that could be "weaponized" as a triggering device for explosives.

To whom will General Motors Corp. now be permitted to sell Humvees, and with what restrictions on their use? Given the resilience under U.S. bombing of Iraq's fibre-optics communications network, essential to Saddam's command-and-control system and supplied in part by the likes of Nortel Networks Corp., how soon before multinationals such as Nortel, JDS Uniphase Corp., Corning Inc. and Sweden's L.M. Ericsson Co. are made to present their order books to Washington for approval?

Just as the international traffic in technology will need to be regulated by the United States, so too will the global flow of money. Having already tried to freeze Iraqi financial assets worldwide, the Bush administration will be tempted to busy itself with strategic interventions in global money markets in efforts to starve other outlaw nations of financing.

Victims of the collateral damage from implementation of the Bush Doctrine will include multinational corporations long accustomed to selling what they want to whomever they want, with minimal or no supervision from the United States or any other government. French oil giant Total SA will now know that doing business in Libya risks French telecom giant Alcatel SA losing contracts with U.S. phone companies. And banks, brokerages, pension funds and other financial intermediaries around the world will be looking over their shoulders as Uncle Sam vets every transaction.

An alarmist scenario? Perhaps. But the Bush Doctrine has plenty of capitalists worried about the global designs of the supposed free-enterpriser in the White House.

"American imperialism is, by definition, a retreat away from global capitalism," says Paul McCalley, a managing director at California-based PIMCO, the world's biggest bond investor. "It's a retreat from the invisible hand of markets in favour of a more dominant role for the visible fist of governments."

As in postwar Iraq, the rebuilding of future targets of "regime change" might also be undertaken exclusively or mostly by U.S. firms in projects for which the U.S. taxpayer alone picks up the tab. It could scarcely be otherwise if much of the world balks, as it did in the Iraq conflict, at how the United States now defines both its national security interests and how to manage them, without recourse to world opinion.

Currently, the European Union and Japan cover most of the cost for their own and UN-administered humanitarian efforts to stabilize trouble spots like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique and Kosovo. With the precedent it has set with Iraq, the United States risks shouldering most of the burden of nation-rebuilding.

"Were Washington to move to an entirely ad hoc approach," forsaking traditional international bodies in dealing with failed regimes, "why would the rest of the world agree to clean up its messes?" asks Newsweek in a recent cover story on "America: The Arrogant Empire."

Sixteen years ago, William Hyland, a national security official in the Nixon and Ford administrations and editor of Foreign Affairs, warned that "isolationism is the Dracula of American foreign policy." Under Bush, the U.S. appears to be reverting to a less benign version of the isolationism that helped cripple the world economy in the 1930s.

The Wall Street Journal, champion both of Bush's Iraqi adventure and unfettered capitalism, recently acknowledged the constraints on capitalism inherent to the go-it-alone Bush Doctrine: "There is a risk that the bitterness so apparent today will linger; that it will be harder to pursue trans-Atlantic business deals; that already tense talks toward freer trade in agriculture and services will be prolonged for years ... and that the focus on strengthening and modernizing post-World War II institutions — the International Monetary Fund and all the rest — will be dissipated."

If Bush means to revolutionize America's place in the world, the United States must brace for the inevitable backlash.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration reneged on a high-profile promise to Mexico, the country Bush himself identified as America's best friend. In a move that undermined Mexican president Vincente Fox's popularity at home, the United States abandoned a plan to legalize the status of millions of undocumented Mexicans working in the United States. (The White House was later surprised when Mexico couldn't bring itself to support it on Iraq at the UN, despite enormous U.S. pressure.)

As anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein observed in the Globe and Mail last week, "Rather than Canadianizing the Mexican border, the United States has opted to Mexicanize the Canadian border," alienating America's other neighbour in the bargain with intrusive new inspections of Canadian citizens born in any of the countries on the White House list of rogue nations.

The predictable result is an anti-U.S. backlash in both countries. "Most officials in Latin American countries today are not anti-American types," Jorge Castaneda, former Mexican foreign minister, told Newsweek recently. "But we find it extremely irritating to be treated with utter contempt."

Fareed Zakaria, the correspondent who interviewed Casteneda, wrote that, "Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the Bush administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it."

The grim harvest of that humiliation has already begun to appear, notably in Europe, where nations that took opposing sides on the Iraq war are quickly patching up their differences.

With a combined population that exceeds the United States, the European countries are attracted as never before to the model of close collaboration in world governance that Bush has rejected — and largely because Bush has rejected it. Some U.S. foreign policy experts thought Polish and Czech support for the Iraq war would drive a wedge between Eastern Europe and the anti-war alliance of France and Germany, the latter famously dismissed by U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "the old Europe."

Many Americans also expected pro-war Britain to turn its back on the continent, seeking a more substantial bond with the United States, pro-war Australia and other outposts of the so-called "Anglosphere." (The hawkish promoters of this new, racism-tinged concept seldom mention the neutrality of Canada and New Zealand over Iraq.)

Yet two weeks ago, British prime minister and war hawk Tony Blair was touring European capitals to renew his commitment to a Britain more thoroughly engaged in joint European decision-making not only on economic policy but the even more challenging task of developing a co-ordinated EU defence and foreign policy.

The East Europeans who so greatly value membership in an expanding EU are in no mood to rebuke the EU economic powerhouses of Germany and France. And in seeking the prosperity and national security continental fraternity, the smaller countries want a voice in Europe's affairs — especially now that the United Nations, traditional venue for small-country influence, has been so assiduously undermined by the United States.

And yet, a future project for a Europe unified as never before might be a revitalization of the UN as a more effective response to U.S. global hegemony. A measure of the virulence of current U.S. antipathy is that the Iraq crisis ended a period of fractious relations between France and Germany.

Whether the French and the others acted on principle over Iraq or in defence of their long-standing financial interests in the Arab world is beside the point. The anti-war Europeans, principally France, Germany and Russia, proved themselves capable not only of forging an anti-war coalition among themselves, but of drawing an Asian power, China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, into their sphere of influence as well.

"If Bush is to act as global emperor, can the UN survive as a parliament which holds him to account?" London's Guardian asked recently. "Now that would be a common European foreign policy worth having."

Washington Times EDITORIAL • March 30, 2003

     It starts with what seems the most inconsequential of actions — a sniff, a stifled cough, a sneeze. It is only afterward — a few days or a few weeks — that the event is seen in a far more sinister light, as the start of an epidemic, the emergence of a new disease.      Such diseases, whether Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus encephalitis or even AIDS, pose a chronic, costly public-health threat that must be constantly monitored — particularly given the threat posed by bioterrorism. As it stands, the cost of infectious diseases is staggering. In the United States, the direct and indirect costs from infectious disease are estimated at more than $120 billion per year. Across the globe, these diseases kill more than 13 million individuals each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).      A rogue's laboratory is only one place from which agents of infection can emerge. So-called superbugs, resistant to several kinds of antibiotics, can emerge as a consequence of evolution coupled with the use of antibiotics. Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is one example. Diseases can emerge as zoonoses — animal diseases that cross to humans. Perhaps the best-known example is the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). They can emerge as new forms of known pathogens, as in the case of influenza, the virus that causes the flu. The agent(s) responsible for SARS are apparently new members of known viral families.      Other ailments are certain to follow SARS. Several factors have increased the incidence and spread of emergent diseases, including the acceleration of urbanization; the movement of humans into new habitats; the wide use of antibiotics; changes in social and behavioral patterns; and globalization, according to a recent Rand Institute study, "The Global Threat of New and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Reconciling U.S. National Security and Public Health Policy." Thanks to the modern speed of travel, emergent diseases can cross continents and oceans in a matter of hours, this helps explain why, on Thursday, WHO urged airlines to screen passengers for the deadly flulike SARS.      Yet, there is always a lag between the discovery of a new disease and the identification of the agent that causes it. For many diseases, there's even a longer lag between the identification the disease and the discovery of an effective treatment or cure. Treatments for AIDS are still being worked on, the reservoir of the Ebola virus has still not been determined and the anthrax mailer is still at large.      Constant, active surveillance is critical in this regard. However, the United States has a long way to go. The Rand study pointed out that state disease reporting to the CDC is done on a voluntary basis, and that, as a result, 90 percent of U.S. states and territories reported just 60 percent of 19 notifiable diseases in 1999. Rand authors also suggest that coordination and information sharing among public-health authorities continue to be improved.      Information sharing is also critical to controlling emerging diseases. While the CDC and the WHO have done an exemplary job during the SARS outbreak, the Chinese government has much to answer for — literally. It took Beijing nearly four months to formally request help from WHO. Twice it has turned away WHO investigation teams attempting to visit Guangdong Province, where the virus reportedly originated. It has yet to reveal everything it knows about the outbreak.      Accordingly, the U.S. government must begin to prepare for the next outbreak by developing more antivirals and antimicrobials, among other measures. Unfortunately, "•nly four large pharmaceutical companies with antibiotic research programs remained in existence in 2002 and not one new class of antibiotics is in advanced development," according to a recent study from the National Academy of Sciences.      Vaccination programs, including the lagging smallpox program, should also be advanced and the timelines accelerated so that those in the public who wish to volunteer for such inoculations are able to receive them.      Ultimately, diseases are no more likely to stop emerging than individuals are to stop sneezing. SARS is a portent of others. Even though the war in Iraq is still raging and the epidemic of SARS is still burning, the government should continue to prepare for the next emerging disease.