Double Standard
If we could only muster the same alertness and resolve in fighting TB, or something as common as diarrhea, which kills thousands of children every year...
By Ding I. Generoso
The trouble with running a developing story in a monthly magazine is you run with it the risk of being overtaken by events or being completely proved wrong by subsequent turn of events while, as the old pressroom expression goes, the pages were being put to bed.
That's exactly what happened with our attempt in our March issue to get current with the story of what is now popularly referred to as SARS.
The story broke out while we were finalizing the pages of the month's issue. Since the story behind SARS was still hazy at the time, we monitored its development and waited for a few days before deciding which story to run. The day we finally went to press was the day the World Health Organization announced that, despite rising toll, SARS was being contained at least outside of Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China, where it was then believed-later proved-to have originated.
Within 48 hours, a sort of SARS explosion took place-with cases in Hong Kong and China nearly doubling and other countries reporting probable cases.
As it turned out, the WHO's declaration of containment turned out to be premature. As we went to press with this issue, nearly 400 have died and more than 6,000 cases have been reported worldwide in a span of about 60 days.
For sure, the spread was dramatic-and alarming-and the danger SARS posed was real and dreadful especially since it's an almost entirely new disease whose cause is yet unknown and for which no cure, much less a vaccine, is available.
There was obviously an urgent need to make people aware of the disease, and to encourage-even compel-them to take precautions.
But to a certain degree the focus and the media hype given to SARS went a bit over what was necessary. You have a bunch of congressmen complaining of their Shanghai junket being sabotaged by a simple travel advisory. You have senators and congressmen accusing the health secretary of not telling the true picture of SARS in the country. You have a president who goes all the way to a little-heard-of town in Pangasinan to mingle with residents mask-free just to assure them-and every Filipino-that their town remains SARS-free. You have a government that all of a sudden found two billion pesos in its supposed to be empty coffers to fight SARS. You have newspapers and television stations all of a sudden dedicating 80 percent of their front-page space and primetime newscasts to a health matter.
No, it is not our intention to downplay a story that needed to be told-for the sake of public safety and national interest.
But as Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit kept emphasizing, SARS was proving to be self-limiting, and that it would be unfortunate if we were to fight "public hysteria" alongside an epidemic.
To us, there is more that can be seen from the way government and the media handled and continues to handle the SARS problem. And it is this: it betrays the usual double standard of attention that we give to our health problems.
Sure, the virus has the capacity to spread fast and furious. 6,000 people infected worldwide in 60 days is an infection rate of 100 a day. 400 dead worldwide in 60 days translates to almost seven people dead everyday. Our part of the toll so far: two dead-a nurse who brought home the virus from Canada and her father whom she infected.
Hey, but yesterday 75 Filipinos died of tuberculosis; today 75 more will die as you read this; and tomorrow another 75 will die. And everyday 300 or so get infected by the TB bacillus.
It is not our intent to trivialize SARS or render of lesser significance the life of those SARS may afflict.
But, if we could only muster the same alertness and resolve in fighting TB, or something as common as diarrhea, which kills thousands of children every year...
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