One hundred grams will save you from SARS

Russians are advised to fight SARS with vodka

The acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which frightened half the planet, managed to get through the cordons hastily erected on the Russian-Chinese border. Yesterday, the country's chief sanitary doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, informed the heads of regional sanitary and epidemiological services that the first case of SARS was registered in Russia. Thus, Moscow confirmed the preliminary diagnosis previously made to Blagoveshchensk resident Denis Soinikov, who was hospitalized last week in serious condition.

It is noteworthy that the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Supervision Department delayed responding to Blagoveshchensk for almost a week. And Amur doctors, who had previously called the symptoms observed in the 25-year-old entrepreneur extremely suspicious, seem to have regarded this delay as a warning cry from the Ministry of Health, because health department leaders regularly report to the White House on successful preventive measures that prevent the spread of the virus in Russia. In any case, yesterday a council of specialists in Blagoveshchensk issued the exact opposite verdict - doctors assured journalists that the patient had ordinary bilateral polysegmental pneumonia. And the severity of Mr. Soinikov’s condition is explained by a whole set of complications: severe sepsis and multiple organ failure.

However, the delay in the final diagnosis was apparently caused by the imperfection of the test systems available to Russian doctors. Although the Ministry of Health ordered their development by scientists soon after alarming reports from China appeared, only in recent days have researchers begun to report the completion of this work. For example, yesterday scientists from the Russian Research Anti-Plague Institute "Microbe" located in Saratov announced that they had prepared a new test system for diagnosing atypical pneumonia in the early stages. As the director of the institute, Vladimir Kutyrev, said, the new test will make it possible to check the presence of the SARS virus in a patient’s biological materials within 7-8 hours in a specialized laboratory. The final conclusion can be obtained after determining the nature of the virus in a special virology center. According to him, the analysis period does not exceed ten days. The cost of a system with enough supply for one hundred examinations will be approximately six thousand rubles. Currently, the institute has already produced test systems for 1,200 determinations. All of them are sent to specialized diagnostic laboratories in other regions of the country.

But with the development of drugs to treat this disease in our country, things are still much worse. Moreover, Russian virologists are very skeptical about reports of successful treatment of patients with atypical pneumonia in the countries of Southeast Asia. “So far, not a single reliable antiviral drug has been created,” said Anatoly Vorobyov, academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, head of the department of microbiology and immunology at the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy, yesterday. According to the scientist, the only way to protect yourself from infection is vaccination. However, for SARS, such a method of control will not be available until three to five years later. According to Mr. Vorobiev, “statements by foreign colleagues that it will take them a couple of months to create a vaccine against SARS sound, to say the least, irresponsible.” Just testing a new drug should take at least a year. At the same time, another academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, director of the Andzhaparidze Research Institute of Viral Drugs Vitaly Zverev, proposed his own method of preventing SARS and many other, not only respiratory, diseases. In his opinion, viruses die well not only from interferon, rheoferon and ribaverin, but also from the traditional one hundred grams of vodka on the Russian menu.

Anna ShPAK