While the spectre of the Ebola virus spreading worldwide is a frightening one, in Canada and particularly in Ontario, we have the advantage of having had to deal with the airborne SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) threat just over a decade ago.
Toronto, through no fault of its own, became the epicenter among developed nations in what was threatening to become a worldwide epidemic from its origins in China.
SARS became a Toronto phenomenon, brought back to Ontario’s capital by a person who had been visiting Hong Kong and had stayed in the same hotel as a physician who had treated patients in Mainland China for the as then unidentified illness. Then, without warning, there were sadly many early casualties, mostly among health professionals. People died from the illness, contracting it in its early days. Most of them were from Toronto.
But health officials in this province responded quickly. Protocols were rapidly worked out and put in place as were mandatory requirements that were initiated among health professionals and ordinary citizens visiting health care facilities.
In Toronto particularly, the sale of face masks that covered people’s mouths and noses increased enormously and in that city during the spring and summer of 2003, a pedestrian walking in any part of the city would encounter citizens who had chosen to don the (usually) blue masks as prophylactic measures for their own benefit or, if they happened to have a cough or cold, because it quickly became the politically correct thing to do.
Screening processes were quickly put in place to isolate anyone entering the country who might be bringing new cases of the disease with them and, perhaps as importantly as anything, in Ontario, the chief medical officer of health made every effort to keep citizens abreast of what was happening on the SARS scene by way of reassurance.
We’re fortunate in that the relatively short time span since SARS was a public health concern means that our health institutions are prepared with people at every level who dealt rapidly and effectively with the SARS threat 11 years ago.
While Ebola is quite a different disease, the SARS experience means that we are not starting from scratch; far from it.
In our own region, Health Sciences North in Sudbury has been designated one of 10 hospitals in the province, and the only institution in Northern Ontario, that will deal with any suspected cases of Ebola in the region.
There will be strictly monitored and enforced isolation protocols put in place at Health Sciences North and local hospitals and medical teams such as ours on Manitoulin have very specific directions about dealing with individuals with suspicious symptoms in the very rare event they are required to do so.
When we first heard about SARS, we were often told in the same sentence that this could (or even would) be the next worldwide “pandemic” with comparisons made to the influenza epidemic of 1918 that claimed far more lives worldwide than had the carnage of the First World War that, in fact, somewhat overlapped with the early days of what was truly a pandemic.
We haven’t heard the treat of Ebola couched in these terms, possibly because the national and international press has thought better of their role in frightening the general population with this kind of hyperbole.
More likely, though, we haven’t been told that the relatively small number of cases of the disease that have surfaced outside of the West African countries where the disease has taken hold represent a pandemic because of how effectively Canada and other western countries dealt with the treat of SARS.
The response, particularly in Ontario, to that last public health threat was effective and provides an enormously useful framework in dealing with current and future health issues that are bound to come to our shores from time to time simply because of the nature of modern international travel.
And don’t forget to wash your hands, thoroughly and often, as a basic rule against any form of contact-based contagion. It’s the easiest and simplest thing we can do to protect ourselves and our families against disease.
