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[Aristotle]

2003-07-06 (Edited at Request of Original Poster)
Taiwan rejoices after removal from SARS list
Country's health authorities warn disease prevention measures should not be relaxed.



http://www.etaiwannews.com/Taiwan/2003/07/06/1057461601.htm

[matchstick_man]

What is SSET and I couldn't find your information source looking through the websites you referenced.

[wix]

Aristotle,

If Taiwan is such a dangerous place I wonder why you didn't leave it long ago. May I ask if you are finally leaving now?

[EOD]

Why does your travel warning look so much like the one from AIT? Is nothing beneath you? You are just getting lazy aren't you? You are also a little slow as most foreign missions to Taiwan put out their travel warnings last month. If you are going to be a scaremonger you may as well get on the ball.
http://ait.org.tw/ait/TSS/ACS/news/news20030510.htm

[Sunpower]

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030523.ugee0523/BNStory/National/?query=hypochondriac
People living in Canada and other rich countries today enjoy a healthier, safer life than any other generation in the whole of human history. Yet if you picked up the newspa�per this week, you wouldn't know it.

SARS. West Nile. Mad-cow. The three horsemen of fear filled the headlines, injuring the economy and frightening many of us out of our wits.

Let's get some perspective.

Compared to the diseases that shadow the lives of people in less fortunate parts of the world, these threats are trivial.

We have become a nation of pathetic hypochondriacs, snivelling over little hurts while our global neighbours drop like flies from real killers.

Malaria takes 10 times as many lives every day as SARS has altogether. More than two million people, many of them infants or young children, die every year from diarrhea caused by drinking impure water. More than eight million people developed tuberculosis in 2001, and two million die from it every year.

Mad-cow disease? Since the human variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was identified in Britain in 1996, 129 people have died of it there. A study this week by the country's top epidemiologists said that the number of new cases that may develop in coming years may be as few as 40, and that 500 is the maximum.

That's a far cry from the apocalyptic forecasts of a few years ago, when some scientists predicted 200,000 deaths a year. Just two years ago, the same team that released this week's study said it could not rule out an overall death toll of 50,000. Despite all the fuss, the mad-cow epidemic in humans simply never hap�pened.

SARS? The total number of cases worldwide is still fewer than 8,000, and the World Health Organization says public health measures are bringing it under control, even in China and Taiwan.

West Nile? It killed 17 people in Ontario last year, fewer than die in road accidents on some Canadian holiday weekends. Only one in every 100 people infected with the virus develops a neuro�logical disease, and fewer than one in 10 of those are likely to die from it.

All in all, we are a remarkably hearty bunch. Statistics Canada says a Canadian child born in 1997 can expect to live 78.6 years, the longest ever. That is partly because mortality rates for the leading causes of death — including some can�cers — have been falling. One of the main gauges of a society's health, infant mortality, has been declining for a cen�tury. "In 1901," Statscan says, "134 of every 1,000 infants — roughly 1 in 7 — died in their first year. By 1997, that rate had declined to 5.5 per 1,000, meaning only 1 in every 182 babies did not see its first birthday." No wonder Statscan calls us "a healthy people."

Healthy, yet filled with anxiety about our health. Hardly a week goes by with�out some health scare or another. Not long ago, it was toxic chemicals in pres�sure-treated playground equipment — a threat, we were told, to our precious chil�dren. This week, it was lawn pesticides, subject to a potential ban in Toronto because of the dubious claim that they might threaten our health. A few years ago, parents rushed to pull down a certain kind of window blind because the lead dust on it might poison the kids — though only, it turned out, if they licked the slats one by one every day for months.

These hysterics cost us all heavily. Think of the hundreds of millions spent getting rid of insulating PCB chemicals, despite a lack of any evidence of harm unless the stuff was actually ingested. Or consider the multimillion-dollar cam�paign against urea formaldehyde house insulation, ultimately proved to be quite harmless.

But the cost isn't the point. We can af�ford to be hypochondriacs if we choose to be. The point is a moral one. In a suffering world beset by real afflictions, it is simply obscene the way we fixate on minor or non-existent health threats. The rich world today is like an Elizabethan lord picking at a hangnail as the peasants expire from plague in the surrounding cottages.

Three infections — malaria, AIDS and TB — killed 5.7 million people around the world in 2001, accounting for one-tenth of all world deaths. A commission sponsored by the WHO reckoned the world would have to spend $10-billion a year to fight these three killers effectively in poor and middle-income countries. Only $2.8-billion is being spent now.

Isn't it time to stop picking at hang�nails and reach for the wallet

Globe and Mail, May 23, 2003

[Aristotle]

The World Health Organiztion has lifted the Travel Warning for Taiwan.
www.who.int.

[EOD]

SARS has abaited or has it?
There still are 47 countries reluctant to remove their travel warnings for Taiwan.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/06/21/2003056134

[revelation99]

[quote="Sunpower"]http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030523.ugee0523/BNStory/National/?query=hypochondriac
People living in Canada and other rich countries today enjoy a healthier, safer life than any other generation in the whole of human history. Yet if you picked up the newspa�per this week, you wouldn't know it.

SARS. West Nile. Mad-cow. The three horsemen of fear filled the headlines, injuring the economy and frightening many of us out of our wits.

Let's get some perspective.

yes. let's. wht don't you come on down to the 3rd world for that. step up to the plate and try walking in the world of reality for a change.