More Work Needed for Ont. To Track Infectious Diseases Like SARS: Experts

By Maria Babbage, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO – Five years after SARS killed 44 people, jeopardized hundreds more and paralyzed the health-care system in Toronto, there’s still much work to be done to deliver a system that effectively tracks infectious diseases across the province, despite progress already made on the file, experts said Tuesday.

The lessons of SARS have left the province much better prepared to deal with health-care emergencies, and the government is making “good strides” in creating a system to detect similar outbreaks, Health Minister George Smitherman said at an event attended by some of Ontario’s leading disease control experts.

Still, Smitherman cautioned the province cannot be fully prepared for every possible emergency.

“In the name of those Ontarians who lost their lives, we accept our responsibility to never be satisfied with where we have come from – rather, to focus clearly on the distance we have yet to travel,” Smitherman said.

His optimism was echoed by Premier Dalton McGuinty, who said the province has made a number of changes to ensure it is “much better prepared” to cope with a similar outbreak.

“I think we’ve learned a great deal from that horrific experience,” McGuinty said earlier Tuesday.

While officials agree the province is better equipped to deal with a crisis like SARS, they acknowledged there’s still much work to be done in setting up a new arm’s-length public health agency and a system for tracking infectious diseases.

“We have to build the infrastructure for this new agency,” said Dr. Donald Low, an infectious diseases expert who helped lead the fight against SARS in Toronto.

“That is, we’ve got to recruit the people that can make this thing work, and that’s going to take time.”

One important position was filled Tuesday when Smitherman named Dr. Vivek Goel, vice-president of the University of Toronto, to head up the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, which will provide advice and support to protect public health.

Goel, a professor of public health sciences and health policy, vowed the agency will put the best interests of Ontario residents first and speak out about public health issues “even if what we have to say is not politically popular.”

The agency’s office in Toronto’s medical discovery district will be named after Dr. Sheela Basrur, the city’s former medical officer of health who was instrumental in managing the SARS crisis, Smitherman said.

Basrur, sporting a shorn head from her battle with a rare form of cancer, embraced the health minister following the announcement, her voice breaking as she thanked him.

The former Ontario chief medical officer of health spoke about the “mortal fear” driven into the hearts of health-care professionals five years ago as the SARS crisis deepened.

“SARS also shocked us out of a complacency that we didn’t even know we had,” she said.

“Never before had businesses and workers from all walks of life been devastated by the effects of an infectious disease that was largely confined to health-care institutions.”

SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, hit the Toronto area in the spring of 2003. Forty-five per cent of Ontario’s 375 cases were health-care workers, and two nurses and a doctor were among the 44 who died.

British Columbia had a SARS case arrive from Hong Kong in the early days of the global outbreak, before the disease even had a name. Through good luck and advance outbreak planning, British Columbia quickly isolated its few infections and never experienced the explosive growth of cases that paralyzed the Toronto area.

The final report of a commission into Toronto’s SARS crisis concluded that health-care workers were not adequately protected during the four-month period the virus plagued Ontario hospitals and recommended dozens of changes to hospital practices, disease surveillance and provincial public health and emergency legislation.

The Liberals vowed to implement the commission’s recommendations, but have been facing tough questions in recent weeks about whether they’ve moved quickly enough to boost Ontario’s preparedness for a similar emergency.

Dr. Allison McGeer, head of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, recently said Ontario wasn’t prepared to manage a large-scale infectious outbreak.

Low noted Tuesday there are reports that federal funds earmarked for the surveillance program may be taken away.

“What we’ve heard through the media is that, in fact, the funding for this surveillance program is that there’s cutbacks in that funding, and it’s a time when the funding should be growing,” he said.

Opposition critics say they’re concerned because the Liberals haven’t dealt with other major gaps in the system, such as a shortage of health-care workers in hospitals and insufficient areas to quarantine those suspected of infection.

“Of course everything does take time, but you know what, folks? It has been five years,” said Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer.

“In many respects, we already know that more people would die, more people would be put in hospital. And we don’t have a system.”

NDP Leader Howard Hampton said it’s clear Ontario isn’t better prepared, and that the Liberals haven’t acted on many of the report’s recommendations.