In line with recommendations from the Center for Disease Control, Dartmouth is openly welcoming students and visitors from countries that the World Health Organization has highlighted as being high-risk for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Although other colleges have enacted policies requiring individuals who may have been exposed to SARS to spend 10 days outside of their country before coming to campus -- allowing for the 10-day incubation period that occurs before symptoms appear -- Dartmouth is not instating such a policy, said Dr. Jack Turco, Director of Health Services at the College during a panel discussion yesterday.
"We're welcoming people to come to campus," Turco said.
Turco and Steve Silver, the Director of the International Office, expressed their fears that the SARS scare would result in racial profiling.
"We don't want people who look like they come from China to be treated differently," Turco said. Silver added that he hopes assumptions will not be made about people "based on their racial or ethnic identity or by their home address."
Silver and Turco also discussed the reason behind the College's decision to cancel the Foreign Study Program in Beijing this summer. FSPs have been cancelled in past years due to political unrest, but this case was new -- the College consulted with the State Department, the CDC and the WHO in making their decision.
"People were advised to avoid all unnecessary travel to China," Silver said. "We're really monitoring the health experts for advice on this one."
SARS is believed to have originated in the Guang-hou province in China, explained Dr. Kathy Kirkland. She said that although health experts are not entirely sure of the biological origins of the illness, the most likely scenario is that a human contracted SARS from a bird or animal carrying the organism. The first case -- in November, 2002 -- went unnoticed at the time, and about 7,500 cases have been recorded since February, 2003, when 13 hotel guests in Hong Kong contracted SARS and returned to their homes, spreading the illness to others.
Kirkland put SARS in perspective with other diseases studied intensely by public health organizations. While only 600 people have died from SARS so far -- eight percent of all cases -- two million people die annually from tuberculosis, one million from malaria, three million from AIDS and 250,000 from influenza.
According to Kirkland, so far 50 percent of all SARS patients have recovered from their bouts with the illness, though a precise cure for it has not been established.
