{"id":1106,"date":"2003-05-01T07:55:18","date_gmt":"2003-05-01T11:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/01\/1106.html"},"modified":"2003-05-01T07:55:18","modified_gmt":"2003-05-01T11:55:18","slug":"how-i-learned-to-start-worryin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/01\/how-i-learned-to-start-worryin\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Learned to Start Worrying and Forget about SARS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>OK, so one of Your Humble Blogger's pet peeves is the way low-probability high-profile events become, er, high-profile, despite neither being particularly interesting or particularly noteworthy. Howard Markel and Stephen Doyle got cranky, too, and put <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/packages\/pdf\/opinion\/030430_edt_MARK.pdf\">this piece<\/a> in the New York Times. For those of you without NYT registration, it's a sort of (ill-designed) visual representation of the actual health\/epidemic worries in the world we actually inhabit, with 2 million deaths a year attributable to TB; 1,000,000 to malaria; and 353 to SARS (actually, 372 according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.who.int\/csr\/sarscountry\/2003_04_30\/en\/\">WHO<\/a>).\n<p>Look, I'm not saying that the CDC and the WHO shouldn't be hanging out the bat-signal, it's just that if you don't live in China or Singapore, you shouldn't particularly worry about it. There were a couple of weeks were it looked both virulent and deadly to an extent that should cause concern, and now it looks like most people recover from it, and even the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.who.int\/csr\/sarsepicurve\/epiindex\/en\/print.html\">curves from a week ago<\/a> give the appearance of something under control.\n<p>Whew, of course. Now can we pay attention to something that actually kills thousands of people, such as, oh, malaria or tuberculosis?\n<p>Thank you,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, so one of Your Humble Blogger&#8217;s pet peeves is the way low-probability high-profile events become, er, high-profile, despite neither being particularly interesting or particularly noteworthy. Howard Markel and Stephen Doyle got cranky, too, and put this piece in the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}