WHO warns against travel to Toronto
 

?As a result of ongoing assessments as to the nature of outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Beijing and Shanxi province, China, and in Toronto, Canada, WHO is now recommending, as a measure of precaution, that persons planning to travel to these destinations consider postponing all but essential travel,? the group said in a statement issued from Geneva.

?We?re recommending that people ... postpone that travel if possible because, as was the case for Hong Kong and Guangdong, these areas now have quite a high magnitude of disease, a great risk of transmission locally ? outside of the usual health workers ? and also they?ve been exporting cases to other countries,? Dr. David Heymann, WHO?s communicable diseases chief, told reporters by telephone from Thailand.

Now people can't accuse me of trying to disrupt the webmaster summit :1orglaugh

Actually I know of someone who was at a some convention last week (to my knowledge, it has nothing to do with the summit) in Toronto and he is now back in Montreal and was contacted to go in quarantine.

It's blown way out of proportion and I live here.

I was in Toronto, walked up and down Younge St. Neither my wife and I are sick. Many people are regular commuters to work in Toronto and it hasn't spread east or west.

yeah,the fuckn media has nothing better to do,except turning SARS from a tic-tac,into a hotdog.
theres more deaths casued by the common cold

While there may indeed be more deaths caused by the common cold, it's the percentage of deaths attributed to SARS that's downright scary. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 9% was the last number I saw. If you don't take this seriously, then you're simply being ignorant like those Canadian health workers that violated quarantine because they were bored at home.

:321GFY

I would listen to the WHO before I listened to any Canadian public health statement. After Canadian public health officials lied to us about the West Nile virus last year I don't believe anything they say. They were telling us last year that West Nile was just like a bad flu and only risky for old people. Now we find out that they were concealing the fact that about 20% of all people who contract West Nile end up with neurological disorders which cause paralysis and can put you into a vegetative state. So don't trust them when they say everything is ok and remember that they don't want to cause a panic so they will conceal the truth to avoid any panic.

BTW, a neighbour of mine is a driver for the TTC and he told me that the TTC is not letting any of it's workers wear masks to protect themselves from SARS. Apparently that's not the message they want to send to the community :321GFY

NoCarrier, thanks for not trying to disrupt the Toronto Webmaster Summit:1orglaugh :thumbsup

"Unless the virus spontaneously mutates into a less dangerous form, the only hope we have is to mount an immediate aggressive global response at the highest levels against Sars, something we've not yet seen.

"If things continue as they are, with a mixture of denial, confusion, delay, ignorance, bad decisions, poor data gathering, official decision-making paralysis, incompetence, concealment, secrecy and government apathy in some parts of the world, then a pandemic is surely only a matter of time."

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_773512.html

I seriously did my best to make sure it gets cancelled. I miserably failed. :1orglaugh

I'll still pay you guys a beer in Montreal. :drinkup