SARS AND HIV

SARS is obviously a huge worry. But it still makes sense to recall that many more people have died of the flu recently than of SARS – and almost certainly will do in the coming months. But what does worry me is the possibility of a combined SARS and HIV epidemic across the developing world. People with weaker immune systems, as Luc Montagnier has just pointed out, are far more vulnerable to viruses like SARS. Healthy HIV-positive people in the West might do okay (fingers crossed), but the death-rates in Africa or Southeast Asia could surely soar from the double-whammy.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: This time for the headline writer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Their summary of Iraqi Christian sermons yesterday: “US occupation like crucifixion, Easter mass told.” Then, when you read the story you find something a little different:

“I told the faithful that Iraq lived through its passion in recent weeks with the American invasion,” said Father Butros Haddad, priest at the Church of the Virgin Mary in central Baghdad. “But it will be reborn like Christ was resurrected,” the cleric told hundreds of Chaldean Catholic faithful. “The resurrection comes always after the passion, joy comes back always after the pain.”

So the pain of war was necessary for the rebirth of a nation. Slightly different gloss, don’t you think?

THE WAR IN BRITISH JOURNALISM: The pro-war papers stood still in circulation. The tabloid anti-war paper, the Daily Mirror, went into free-fall. Even Robert Fisk’s former promoter concedes Fisk had a “pretty dreadful war.”