Common sense can cure both SARS and our misplaced panic

SHOCKING? Awful? Reprehensible? Scandalous? Or just plain Silly Amateurish Ridiculous Shambles? Whatever way you look at SARS, it's been another bad week for the government, and especially for the increasingly hapless Minister for Health.

First things first. SARS is serious, or at least it could be. It is a potentially dangerous and worrying condition. So little is yet known about its causes and origins, how it spreads and what sort of damage it can do, that it has to be taken seriously.

But the Ebola virus it isn't. In the aftermath of the first world war, a flu outbreak killed more than ten million people around the world, and especially in Europe. Soldiers who had survived some of the most awful wartime conditions in history died in the train on the way home from flu. The undernourished people of Germany, Russia and the Balkans were worst hit.