I take the last sentence back. This last week I decided to give up on the weblog, having decided that it wasn’t my preferred form, and that all I was doing was contributing to what David Sheck called “data smog”. Then I had a noxious item of spam forwarded to me that disproved the assertion in my last statement of my last entry. It was from an individual claiming to be a Dr of alternative medicine, advancing a conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS (that it is intended as a population reduction measure) and that there is a big coverup going on, that the media and public health were involved in scaremongering. No sources referenced, needless to say, and in tone and strategy fitting the very case-definition of quackery. NB: personal opinion is that alternative medicine is not quackery; in a broad sense the wise application of the principles underlying alternative medicine will carry us further beyond absence-of-disease than conventional medicine, but certain of its practitioners are, not to put too fine a point on it, a menace.

So, here I go, with my own preferred SARS links:

• World Health Organization site, offers daily updates and the occasional summary (see April 11 update) where the tone is sober and the perspective global. The SARS outbreak shares space with reports of Ebola, drought and the looting of hospitals in Iraq.
• The Canadian Medical Association Journal based in Ottawa (3-4 hours on the ground from Toronto), has a SARS update page with the latest consensus advice for physicians and patients, public contact numbers, and news items, and in addition is starting to produce preprint copies of articles and commentaries around the outbreak – describing the experience of patients, health care workers and families in one of the affected hospitals and describing the use of the web and the internet in enabling collaboration.
• The Globe and Mail has an annoying tendency to qualify the word ‘virus’ with the word ‘deadly’ – one might call it a ‘reflex’ or perhaps a ‘knee jerk reflex’ – and they have the automatic newspaper skew that the new and disturbing developments and concerns get reported but the boring old follow-up and implementation of counter-measures don’t. But I’m still with them.
• Sarswatch is a weblog dedicated to detailed, considered reporting of SARS.