Technology masks the true message of Sars

COMMENTARY--There's a pub in Soho, just next to Chinatown, called the John Snow. The name is rich in irony: it commemorates a teetotal doctor who discovered in the mid 19th century that cholera passes through polluted water. During an epidemic, he found a cluster of cases near a public water pump: he took away the handle and the infection rate went down.

Snow's work was one of the first forays into public health. Although report after report made the connection between squalor and disease, and showed that disease itself forced people into poverty, there was strong opposition to the idea that the state, rather than the individual, should take responsibility for health.

Even when Pasteur's germ theory revealed mechanisms and possible treatments, it took time for such ideas to percolate through. At the turn of the century, working-class English slums still had 50 percent infant mortality, but by then it had become obvious to all that disease wouldn't stay with the helpless. The mighty halls of Westminster were sick of the stench from the open sewers, and human rights for all followed on behind.

Skip forward a century, and in our sanitized Western culture we have to look a little further afield for our hives of disease. Take Asia, for example, where the strong suspicion is that Guangdong province and faulty Hong Kong sewerage has let the Sars virus out of the bag. Ever since 1969's SF horror novel "The Andromeda Strain" we've been nervously waiting for the first big bug to come rampaging out of nowhere. This could be it.

The instinct is to isolate--no remedy in itself--and here our technology offers a typically short-term fix. In Hong Kong you can subscribe to Sunday Communication's Sars area warning service on your mobile phone. Back here, you can opt to telework from home if your office is in a high-risk area or, even more worrying, you've just come back from Toronto and your colleagues have taken to pushing facemasks under your office door.

And if you're under proper house arrest in Singapore--sorry, preventative quarantine--the authorities are likely to use that wonderful high speed digital network they so thoughtfully provided a while back to slap a Web cam on you and make sure you're not nipping out for the Beecham's. From digital thermometers at the airport to the current rush to patent the Sars DNA sequence--yes, really--the entire machinery of the high tech world is being turned on the hapless pathogen.

Even Gartner's analysts, more used to pronouncing on the health or otherwise of feverish dot-coms, have got in on the act: Steve Bittenger, an analyst with Gartner Research, says that in the post 9-11 world most business have worried about backups and infrastructure. "Few enterprises have addressed the type of crisis that results from a biological or health threat that affects employees' ability to travel to the workplace," he said.

Technology is at the forefront of the fightback, too. Scientists have long worried about the risk of a global pandemic, even if the reality has shown a lack of preparedness at government level. Isolating an unknown pathogen, identifying it and starting work on its weaknesses is a task that used to take decades: this time, we've got a large part of the way there in a handful of weeks. Without IT-fuelled sequencing and data analysis tools, we'd be nowhere.

Already, there's a sense of complacency abroad. The media are blamed for over-promoting a disease that doesn't infect many people and even then doesn't kill most of its victims. Sure, there may be cities laid low in China--but we're OK. Toronto was an over-reaction. They'll have a vaccine tomorrow, and we can go back into the Chinese restaurants.

For Dr. Snow, such reactions would be as far off the point as the perfectly accurate Victorian observation that you didn't catch cholera if you only drank beer. Until the underlying source of the infections is addressed, and decent living conditions for all made an international priority, then all we're buying is time.

We have to understand that with all our technology, Guangdong is as close to London as Victorian Soho was to Westminster. The next virus might live longer in the air, have a longer incubation time and kill with far more aplomb. Like a four-wheel drive car in the snow, our fantastic technology just means that when we get stuck, we're a lot further away from safety.

In any case, a life spent in silicon-mediated, germ-free isolation is no life at all. Even if freedom from fear of contagion means one is free to visit pubs in Soho, places where good health is drunk to but oh-so-rarely achieved.