U.S. SARS cases still rare, but worries are more common

The illness may not have spread in the United States to the same degree as in some other nations, but fear of it has.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. June 16, 2003.

The woman was coughing and short of breath. She had a fever. And she was also positive she had severe acute respiratory syndrome.

But here's the rest of the story. The woman had never traveled more than 10 miles from her home in rural Arkansas -- never, that is, before being hospitalized as a result of this very condition. Thus, her doctor had to break the news to her. She was sick, that was true. But her problem was much more mundane. She had community-acquired pneumonia.

"That was a 20-minute conversation," said Robert Hopkins, MD, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

The emergence of SARS in Asia and Canada is testing the communication skills of physicians here. With only a few dozen U.S. cases of SARS, nearly all linked to international travel, many physicians report that while they're not dealing with SARS infections, they are dealing with SARS anxiety.

"On a daily basis, we get at least one or two questions about SARS," said Sharon Allison-Ottey, MD, an internist and geriatrician at COSHAR Medical in Baltimore. "It does take a bit of hand-holding because every night, if they watch the nightly news, they hear something about SARS. You've got to address their fears with facts."

Physicians are saying that those with regular seasonal allergies or bronchitis are showing up in their offices worried about SARS. They don't meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria for the disease, but they know there is something wrong.