The numbers need not have been so high. The severity of the outbreak was a social and health disaster aggravated by years of health-care cutbacks by capitalist governments at all levels who are aiding the bosses’ drive to prop up their profits.

The size of the SARS outbreak in Ontario “was an accident waiting to happen,” said William Bowie, an infectious disease specialist at the University of British Columbia. “Because of the priorities of the government, the cost-cutting measures, the conditions were great for SARS to take hold.” He was interviewed in a May 3 Toronto Globe and Mail article.

On Oct. 18, 2001, five microbiologists were cut from the payroll at the main Ontario public health lab. Only two remain there today. Several had left before the layoffs, fed up with underfunding. The firings went ahead despite the fact that seven people had died from water tainted with a particularly dangerous form of E. coli bacteria in Walkerton, Ontario, 17 months earlier, and the West Nile virus had made its appearance in the province. Labs such as this one would ordinarily work on rapid identification and developing diagnostic tests for new strains of disease.

“Do we want five people sitting around waiting for work to arrive?” said Health Ministry spokesperson Gordon Haugh at the time, justifying the job cuts. “It would be highly unlikely that we would find a new organism in Ontario.” As the Globe article noted, however, that is precisely what happened.

Several other related factors contributed to the severity of the SARS outbreak in Toronto.

The Ontario government’s own estimates show that it cut spending on 37 local public-health units by 21 percent over the past four years. These units keep track of communicable diseases and develop programs to contain them.

The cuts to hospital budgets have led to hospital managers refusing full-time jobs to nurses. Half the 100,000 nurses in Ontario work as casuals or part-time, and often have to work at two hospitals to make a living, which can hasten the spread of a new disease. In Toronto, the SARS epidemic was largely hospital-based and dozens of cases were among health-care workers.

The outbreak highlighted the shortage of health professionals and clerical workers to trace those who may have been exposed. Dr. Sheela Basrur, Toronto’s chief medical officer of health, had to take people off an investigation of a tuberculosis outbreak in local hostels and syphilis cases. “We would try to beg, borrow, or steal staff from other health units,” said Dr. Basrur.

Twenty people were brought from other provinces and 62 were reassigned, bringing to 305 the number of people in Toronto charged with tracing the movements of thousands of people who may have come into contact with the virus and keeping in touch with thousands in quarantine to make sure the required conditions were being observed.

Nor was there central communication or a common database for the hospitals. Dr. Allison McGeer, head of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, noted that early in the initial outbreak at Scarborough Grace Hospital, where the infection was first observed, there had been infections associated with intubating (inserting a device to keep open the airway) a SARS patient.

“Maybe if we had that data,” she said, “we might have seen more clearly the risk involved in certain procedures and prevent what happened at Sunnybrook,” where several health workers contracted SARS after a four-hour long effort to intubate a patient.

Basrur questions why the traditional Throne Speech, where the provincial government presents legislative initiatives for the coming year, did not even mention public health in the speech in early May. “I challenge you to find any mention of public health in there,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a wake-up call and people are still sleeping.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home