A shrinking, risky world.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Anyone doubting that our world has become a global village need only consider the speed with which the mysterious disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, has spread throughout the world.

Globalization has joined more than the familiar spheres of politics, economics and the environment. The world's unprecedented interconnectedness, made possible by fast, high-volume international travel, makes the rapid spread of communicable diseases a new and pressing problem.

SARS first appeared in China five months ago, and is now suspected of sickening more than 2,200 people in 17 countries. Across the world, 82 people are believed to have perished from it as of the weekend.

The disease, which a World Health Organization official has described as more contagious but less deadly than the Ebola virus, has generated a flurry of news stories in the United States, where it so far has infected relatively few people and killed none. As of late last week, the country had about a hundred reported cases of the disease, including seven in Washington state and about two dozen in California. One suspected case was reported in Oregon.

The outbreak has raised concerns about China's negligence in reporting the outbreak to international health officials. The first cases appeared in the southern province of Guandong in November, but Chinese officials maintained a wall of silence and denials until last month. By then, the disease had already started its wildfire spread.

That spread might have been contained if Chinese officials had been honest and candid in reporting the disease. Even now, Chinese officials are still balking at WHO requests for regular updates.

If China wants to be embraced as a full participant in the world market, it must work with international health officials to devise common standards of information exchange on public health issues similar to those already in place in the West. The days of hiding damaging health, environmental and other critical information from the rest of the world must end.

Meanwhile, SARS remains a mystery to health officials who are hard at work trying to pinpoint its cause. Until that happens, authorities won't know whether it is truly a new disease or one that is simply newly recognized among the millions of cases that go undiagnosed.

In the United States, there is no cause for panic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria for determining whether an illness might be a case of SARS are simple: fever, respiratory illness and recent travel to places where SARS is being transmitted.

So far, the disease has not responded to any treatments and there is no effective test for it. Public health officials across the world are taking differing levels of action - from quarantines to handing out literature - because there is no medical consensus on how to prevent the spread of the disease, or even on how it spreads.

In the United States, the CDC has urged Americans not to travel to affected areas unless they have urgent business. Some businesses, schools and other institutions have curtailed travel to China and Southeast Asia. Some have even begun restricting travel to Canada, where more than a hundred cases have been reported, several of them fatal.

There are, of course, pre-globalism precedents for worldwide health scourges. In 1918, the Spanish flu swept the planet and left 20 million to 40 million people dead, a half-million in the United States alone.

If globalization has made the potential for spreading diseases greater than ever before in history, it also has helped focus unprecedented resources for battling them. Eleven medical laboratories in 10 nations are working full tilt to track the cause of the mystery illness. Recently, 80 scientists from more than a dozen countries shared their latest findings by teleconference.

Welcome to the global village. Stay healthy.