Frank N. SteynHere's a
pretty scary column on the bird flu from the best in the business.
Her son Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional in Canada, was left on a trolley in Emergency for 12 hours, exposed to hundreds of people. Despite all the memos warning them to be on the look-out for this new and highly contagious disease, after discovering that his patient's mother had recently died after returning from Hong Kong, the doctor concluded that, even if Tse was infectious, it was only with TB.
So Tse died, but not before infecting the man lying next to him on that ER trolley hour after hour: Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He was eventually isolated with symptoms of Sars, but apparently it never occurred to the hospital also to isolate Mrs Pollack. So she wandered around the wards and infected an 82-year-old man from a Catholic charismatic group. Mr Pollack, Mrs Pollack, the octogenarian charismatic and his wife all died, and their sons infected at least 30 other members of their religious group, plus a Filipina nurse, who flew back to Manila and before her death introduced Sars to a whole new country.
