‘Censorship Doesn’t Just Stifle Speech – It Can Spread Disease’ is certainly a headline to get me to look at the article – ‘eh what? Do they really have anything to do with each other?’ were my thoughts. Unfortunately from the point of view of someone looking for interesting and completely new it is not some new disease that spreads whenever a newspaper is told not to publish an article it is however rather more rational. The answer is Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). This is a disease that first appeared in the Middle East, in particular in Saud Arabia, last year. It is a respiratory illness that creates a fever, cough, and shortness of breth. It is a coronavirus although it is different from previous such viruses found in humans (you may remember another coronavirus Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) causing problems a decade ago). We do not yet know exactly how it is spread except that it can be spread from person to person when people are in close contact. The biggest problem is its mortality rate; it has killed almost half of the people who have been infected, there have so far been 103 cases and 49 deaths. On to what this has to do with censorship. The outbreak started in, and continues in, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia however has been far from fourthcoming about its dealings with the virus. It is symptomatic of the secrecy that the first doctor to alert the rest of the medical community to the disease was sacked as a result of his posting to ProMED. The Saud ministry of health has provided little detail and has been very slow about letting in outside medical help from the WHO. The SARS outbreak showed the value of spreading information rapidly and the costs of attempting to conceal an outbreak but this lesson does not seem to have been learnt in Saudi Arabia. So far the outbreak is clearly very limited and will hopefully remain so. The Hajj – where millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca – is to take place in just over a month (October 13th to 18th) let us hope the Saudis are prepared and have the disease under control before such a convergence of people that could potentially distribute the disease across the world. wired/opinion/2013/08/ap_mers/ cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/faq.html idebate.org/blog-post/effects-censorship-disease-control
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:47:25 +0000
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