Health officials say SARS fear overblown. (Up Front).

For all the coverage of severe acute respiratory syndrome, it might have appeared that a new influenza epidemic was sweeping the world last week.

But there's a belief among local epidemiologists that much of the fear is unwarranted.

With fewer than 3,000 cases reported worldwide since November, when the disease started cropping up in Asia, doctors who study communicable disease outbreaks say that, so far, the fear outstrips the danger.

"If this was a truly pandemic disease like influenza we would have millions of cases in the same time period," said Dr. Shirley Fannin, an epidemiologist with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, who labeled much of the reaction closer to "hysteria."

Locally, only seven cases had been reported in Los Angeles County close to week's end, and only one of the patients remained hospitalized. There were no deaths reported here or among the natoin's 85 cases.

Even so, with the number of cases growing worldwide and nationally, local medical officials and authorities were taking numerous precautions, including alerting hospitals, doctors and people at risk to be on guard.

"A higher degree of alertness and surveillance by public health officials is very appropriate. Panic on the part of the public is not," said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles County's director of public health.

A new bug

The bug is believed to come from a variant of a virus that causes other upper respiratory illnesses. It results in a fever, body aches and cough. Some patients end up with lung congestion that can land them on a respirator. By late last week, 79 people had died worldwide, giving the bug a roughly 3 percent mortality rate.

What mostly concerned local health officials was a report that SARS had spread quickly among residents of a single apartment complex and hotel in Hong Kong, indicating that it may be easily communicable beyond direct contact with a patient.

"The fear is that this disease appears as if it can be transmitted by an airborne route," said Dr. Rekha Murthy, director of epidemiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Local officials and health care workers were coordinating a number of measures to keep the disease from spreading through the local population.

Travelers at Los Angeles International Airport arriving from Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore and Hanoi were being given notifications from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to seek medical attention if they should come down with symptoms. And at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the U.S. Coast Guard was questioning incoming ships to see if any crew members were sick.

The county health department, meanwhile, sent electronic alerts to the county's hospitals, as well as its thousands of doctors, warning them to be aware of anyone who displayed flu-like symptoms and had recently traveled to Asia. The providers were being told to isolate any suspected cases and then notify public health officials.

Nurses and other intake workers at emergency rooms were being trained to ask patients with respiratory illnesses if they had traveled to Asia, and if so, those patients were being isolated.

Doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center isolated two emergency room patients last week but later decided that neither was likely a SARS case.

Past comparisons

Still, with the number of local and U.S. cases relatively low, public health officials were calling for people simply to be on the alert.

Murthy said the lack of a single fatality in the U.S. indicated the effectiveness of rapid detection and treatment could mean the bug is less dangerous than its Asian history suggests.

SARS numbers also pale compared to some past deadly outbreaks of influenza. The great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 killed at least 20 million people worldwide in two years, including 675,000 Americans. That bug was so deadly that patients would die within hours of its onset.

"It's very easy to create a panic now in the era of CNN and Netscape, but the alarm clearly exceeds the level of danger," Murthy said.

Dean Given, a Santa Barbara psychologist and former president of the California Psychological Association, believes that the current world turbulence has much to do with the level of fear the disease is generating.

"It's much more likely to catch fire now than when our overall level of distress is lower," he said. "Just think of it as kindling for dry brush."

Wido Schaefer, owner of the Travel Store Inc., one of Los Angeles' largest travel services agency, who saw his Asian business shrivel, knows exactly what Given is talking about.

One client going to South Africa refused to even pass through Hong Kong, the normal route, and demanded a flight through London. His comment: "I'd rather get shot by a terrorist than die of pneumonia," recalled Schaefer.