I am not at all surprised at your report (Gov't orders press not to report SARS death) that the Home Ministry had officially directed all major English-language newspapers to "adjust" their reports o­n the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) by leaving out any mention of fatalities.

DjB vu of dengue outbreak?

What is the nature of 'adjustment' here? Not to report suspected cases or fatalities is indefensible enough. To deny the existence of such instances of suspected SARS in Malaysia when there are, is clearly aggravated injury. (Malaysia is still SARS-free, says Health Ministry).

This is because it lulls the populace to complacency in a manner that they do not feel the urgency of taking preventive measures such as avoiding crowded places that they otherwise would have done so, had they been presented with the facts without suppression.

To that extent, it is not fair to the public. Indeed, it is an exceptional country that denies it has any such problem like suspected SARS cases or fatalities when it actually has these where no other country is known yet to have done so.

So let's give the authorities the benefit of doubt and try see the other point of view and divine what is the wisdom, if any, of such a policy of denial, if indeed there is such a policy?

The wisdom is that there is no point in fanning public panic when the government is presently impotent to address the SARS problem, as the impotence will surely in turn serve to aggravate the panic. And this government does not, wherever possible, like to appear impotent in any matter, whether big or small.

Then there is an economic reason. According to your report, "a week ago, the ministry issued a travel alert cautioning Malaysians to avoid SARS-stricken countries". Not forgetting that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, we cannot afford other countries issuing similar warnings to their nationals - including those from SARS-stricken places like Southern China and Hong Kong - not to tour, visit or come to our country, can we?

When we were small, we threatened our playmates - "money or life?" When we are bigger, we know better that it is often money! We cannot afford MAS, our tourist and entertainment industries to lose money from rampant panic and drastic cutting down of all kinds of economic and travel activities.

Now this 'impotence' is no disparagement of the government where no other governments have yet come out with more potent or convincing measures!

Take, for example, the other SAR Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. Sure the Hong Kong authorities have quarantined a block of apartments whose residents, or at least some of them, are suspected to have contracted SARS. Not o­nly are these quarantine measures no guarantee that the virus is not spreading elsewhere in the island, but the authorities also have to contend with idiosyncrasies of residents who, being denied the right to leave the premises, are now asserting their demands for delivery of their special food in recompense!

Singapore's response was to close all schools until April 6 as if after that date the virus would have been vanquished or that the adult family members would not contract it from the work place and bring it home all the same. But since the outbreak of SARS is known, something at least has to be and is seen done, efficacy or futility aside.

The response of our authorities is more ingenuous. Since the measures adopted by others like Hong Kong and Singapore are unlikely to be efficacious, better not let the suspected incidents of SARS be known in the first place with all its attendant panic and economic costs though this does not imply that efforts will not be expended quietly as always and as in the case of dengue to find ways to address this problem.

Containment of the disease is however not easy - not o­nly for our authorities but any other authority anywhere else.

Six months ago, an influenza quite like SARS was reported to have swept across five out of six provinces in the island of Madagascar and killed as many as 700 people and felled almost 23,000 victims. Could SARS have come from this island to South China? I wonder.

I read somewhere that World Health Organisation (WHO) officials have said that samples taken from victims of the illness have shown it to be Type A influenza, a strain of flu believed to have devastated the world in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic that killed more than 21 million people. (For reference read The Great Dying - the 1918 influenza epidemic by Philip St Vincent Brennan).

It has been said that 400 years before the birth of Christ, Hippocrates described an epidemic of a disease strikingly similar in its symptoms to the 1918 influenza strain that felled an entire Athenian army. It is ironical that humans, who reign supreme in the animal kingdom, can be defeated by the microscopic virus.

The pertinent question now to be asked is whether the virus that killed millions worldwide in 1918-19 before suddenly vanishing might have gone underground and now surfaces in a mutated form of SARS to threaten the world.

For common flu may be common but o­nce mutated it can be uncommonly virulent as it is deadly.

US health authorities should immediately direct the world renowned Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to immediately study and find a vaccine for SARS before it spreads worldwide and reaches the shores of the United States which will make the threat of Saddam Hussein's biological weapon a mild scare by comparison.

In the face of a clear and present danger of such potential magnitude of which there is no antidote and countries more advanced than us have not yet found an effective way to contain it what else do we expect of our omnipotent authorities here to do when they already have problems o­n their hands dealing with the dengue outbreak?

So what if a few suspected SARS cases or fatalities are admitted and splashed across national media? Will there be any really effective preventive measures that can be taken by us that would make a difference?

Whilst this may be debatable, it seems natural, as a spontaneous response, to pretend that there is no such problem at least until such time that the pretensions cannot hold any longer or until such time other countries or WHO have found an answer to the problem.

At least it can, for the time being, avert panic that has immediate devastating consequences o­n the economic and social lives of Malaysians disproportionate to the isolated cases and level of threat evinced so far.