Sadly Familiar
Human response to SARS mimics history of world epidemics.
By Richard Ingham
Agence France-Presse
PARIS
SARS may be a novel illness but the history books show that many of the worst human responses to it- fear, ignorance, superstition, greed, overreaction and paranoia-are nothing new.
Epidemics of the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, and more recently AIDS are larded with accounts of behavior that may be grimly familiar to inhabitants of Hong Kong, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Toronto, the hot spots of the SARS outbreak.
For China's cover-up of SARS, there is the scandalous equivalent in Britain in 1664, when the authorities knew that the plague would be brought across the North Sea through trade with the Netherlands. Yet, as was the case in China today, for months officialdom did nothing to advise the public and only acted after the disease had firmly taken root.
"It seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private," lamented Daniel Defoe in his memoir, A Journal of the Plague Year.
Just as some SARS-fearing Hong-kongers and Chinese were turning to turnips, home-made recipes, and faith to ward off SARS, plague cures made the fortune of unscrupulous pedlars in Defoe's London, and religious fervor rose.
"The posts of houses and corners of streets were plastered over with doctors' bills and papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and tampering in physic, and inviting the people to come to them for remedies," Defoe wrote.
"Infallible preventive pills against the plague. Neverfailing preservatives against the infection. Sovereign cordials against the corruption of the air. Exact regulations for the conduct of the body in case of an infection. Anti-pestilential pills. Incomparable drink against the plague, never found out before. An universal remedy for the plague. The only true plague water. The royal antidote against all kinds of infection;-and such a number more that I cannot reckon up; and if I could, would fill a book of themselves to set them down."
The 14th century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio described in The Decameron about how rumor-mongering swept through Florence after the plague broke out there in 1348. As more and more people fell sick, paranoia infected the mind of everyone.
"One citizen avoided another, everybody neglected their neighbors and rarely or never visited their parents and relatives unless from a distance... what is even more incredible and cruel, mothers and fathers abandoned their children and would refuse to visit them."
Today's anti-SARS quarantines and travel advisories, with all the grumbling, anxiety, and debate about their effectiveness, have a long historical echo.
In the 19th century, Western Europe and America had to confront what was, for them, a new disease-cholera-which originated from India and spread by shipping and trains, the then-equivalent of today's airliners. The disease arrived despite a cordon sanitaire across the boundaries with Asia, and stiff quarantine laws that in some countries provoked great resentment and even riots. The quarantine was mainly useless, because cholera is a water-borne disease spread more by poor sanitation and warm weather than, as in the case of SARS, by person-to-person contact.
Initial fears-swiftly discounted by medical authorities-that the SARS could be an act of bioterrorism likewise have precedents. As the great influenza pandemic raged in the United States in the autumn of 1918, rumors spread that the disease had been spread by German spies who had crept ashore in U-boats.
"It would be quite easy for one of these German agents to turn loose influenza germs in a theatre or some other place where large numbers of persons are assembled," declared Lieutenant Colonel Philip Doane, head of the Health and Sanitation Section of the US Emergency Fleet Corporation, which mustered shipping for the war effort.
It may be easy to sneer at such ideas and feel smug in the 21st century's realm of rationality and scientific knowledge.
SARS is less than six months old, yet we already know it is not at all as infective or as mortal as any of these ancient diseases. And scientists have moved with astonishing speed to identify its cause-the first step towards devising a vaccine and treatment-and, globally, health authorities have done well to brake its spread.
But human responses, including the dark ones, are shaped by millennia of evolution and do not disappear overnight.
Remember: it was only two decades ago that complacent heterosexuals dubbed AIDS "the gay plague."
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