Sunshine

is good

medicine


Canadian officials are understandably upset that the World Health Organization issued a warning to travelers to avoid Toronto, where the most deaths from severe acute respiratory syndrome outside China have occurred.

The warning will certainly interfere with business and tourist travel, but the protestations may be overdone.

“Sunshine is the best of disinfectants,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote in reference to securities law in an opinion granting investors access to brokers’ information.

The idea that scrutiny in the light of day guarantees accountability is equally true when it comes to government and matters of health.

That’s a hard lesson now being learned in China.

Chinese officials withheld information about the initial outbreak of SARS from the World Health Organization and its own citizens. That hesitation is believed to have contributed to the size of the outbreak and greatly influenced global fear.

Of the 4,000 people infected worldwide, 250 have died. That’s a heavy death toll: one for every 16 patients. Of those cases, 140 were in the Toronto area and 16 people there have died. Canada’s death toll is statistically higher than the rate in Asia, which adds to the concern that infection is not easily contained.

Canadian officials, including Toronto’s mayor, Mel Lastman, have assured the public that visiting the city is safe. He points out that all of the Toronto cases occurred in people who traveled to Asia or came into contact with SARS cases in their own homes or in a health-care setting. Canadian health officials have downplayed the danger and our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes the travel advisory was issued prematurely.

Was it?

The WHO issued a travel warning for the Guangdong Province in China on April 2, suggesting travelers postpone all but essential travel. The wording of Wednesday’s Toronto warning is identical and the decision to issue it was based on the pattern of contamination in China, where now two major hospitals are closed and under quarantine to slow the spread of the disease. The WHO recorded the magnitude of the outbreak there and charted patterns of virus transmission. Similar patterns have now been seen in Toronto, so warning travelers makes sense.

The citizens of Toronto are being adequately warned by their own health officials. Advisories are posted in public and online and information is available in the national press. Travelers deserve the same protection and the WHO warning, however temporarily harmful it may be to the city’s image and financial well-being, is a good precaution.

Canadian officials are right to explain to the world what precautions have been taken, but quieting the threat is as wrong in Toronto as it was in China.


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