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A public-health system is only as strong as its weakest link; an epidemic enforces, in the most rigorous fashion, the American credo that all men are created equal. If we allow one segment of our society to suffer and perish from preventable disease, little stands in the way of collective doom. Yet today, 44 million people in the United States are without health insurance; those who can afford to pay for it generally receive inferior treatment, despite the fact that Americans spend $1.4 trillion annually for their health care. Public-health departments across the country have never recovered from decades of cutbacks, despite injections of funding in response to specific emergencies such as AIDS or the threat of bioterrorism. Purchases of newer and more reliable diagnostic-testing equipment have been deferred; technical staff and other employees needed to support epidemiologic and testing programs have been downsized; vital on-site bacteriological and viral laboratories have been closed and the testing outsourced to the lowest bidder or simply abandoned.[1] State and local early-childhood services, prenatal care, immunization campaigns for the poor, alcohol-abuse and smoking-awareness campaigns, monitoring programs for lead and arsenic levels, as well as HIV/AIDS treatment programs, have been curtailed as health departments shift around available monies and reassign what few permanent staff members they have left in an attempt to keep the most critical programs in operation. Prevention becomes secondary to simply keeping people alive. Nor must we concern ourselves simply with the state of American public health; as distances collapse and human populations grow ever more mobile, so also new and deadly diseases (among them Ebola and the Marburg virus) find their way across deserts and oceans. AIDS took decades to escape its origins in central Africa; we should not expect the next simian retrovirus to take so long. SARS made its way from Asia to Toronto in a matter of weeks.

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I found this article fascinating, as I have been a part of several conversations with people involved with the medical community who have said that the U.S. experienced at least as many cases of SARS as Canada did. And though the author, Glasser here admits the problem exists, he does not acknowledge that the U.S. experienced the SARS epidemic - though the WHO says they did. Unofficially, it seems their were many 'unknown respiratory infections' that warranted "just to be safe" isolation south of the border, while SARS statistics in Canada mounted.