Toronto Emergency Medical Services and SARS

Toronto Emergency Medical Services and SARS

SARS in Healthcare Facilities, Toronto and Taiwan

The healthcare setting was important in the early spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in both Toronto and Taiwan. Healthcare workers, patients, and visitors were at increased risk for infection. Nonetheless, the ability of individual SARS patients to transmit disease was quite variable. Unrecognized SARS case-patients were a primary source of transmission, and early detection and...

Ethics and SARS: lessons from Toronto.

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the Toronto area earlier this year forced medical and government workers to make hard choices, often with limited information and short deadlines. Healthcare providers were on the firing line, and were the people most affected by the disease. Decision makers had to balance individual freedoms against the common good, fear for personal ...

Failing emergency medical services.

Failing emergency medical services To the Editor: I refer to the scientific letter entitled ‘Emergency centres lack defibrillator knowledge’.1 I am a recently retired UK accident and emergency consultant who is now attempting to plough back knowledge gained in the discipline of emergency medicine (EM) and trauma to peripheral hospitals in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) under the umbre...

Emergency medical services systems.

Overall, our view of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is too constrained and limits services that could be provided. Some time ago, a friend remarked that EMS was unrelated to Disaster Medicine and, in fact, advised that the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM) and this journal (PDM) needed to concentrate either on Disaster Medicine OR EMS. More recently, this same frie...