WASHINGTON, April 29: People around the world are overreacting to SARS, creating a sense of panic that could overwhelm common-sense measures for containing the virus, top AIDS experts said on Monday.

Sensational media coverage of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has killed 326 people worldwide, has fanned the flames, said David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on how viruses cause disease.

“I think there has been overreaction,” Baltimore, a leading AIDS researcher who is now president of the California Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview.

“I have to agree with that,” added Dr. David Ho, another top AIDS expert who heads the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York.

“Obviously, the fear comes from the fact that this is a novel disease. Many aspects of this epidemic are still mysterious. Fear of SARS is outrunning SARS per se,” Ho added.

Ho and Baltimore ought to know. AIDS kills virtually everyone it infects without treatment and 20 years into the AIDS epidemic there is no cure and no vaccine.

In contrast, 94 percent of SARS patients recover.

Baltimore said World Health Organization moves have been appropriate, such as the controversial recommendation against travel to Toronto, where 21 people have died from SARS.

But boycotts of Chinese-owned businesses and scenes of people walking the streets of Hong Kong wearing surgical masks show that the general public does not understand the real dangers, Baltimore said.

“As much as overreaction, there has been a lack of balance, of putting it into perspective, because it is a real problem, no question,” Baltimore said.

“But people clearly have reacted to it with a level of fear that is incommensurate with the size of the problem and I think it is getting in the way of a reasonable response.”

The government in China, where SARS appears to have originated late last year, has been criticized for covering up the initial outbreak — but officials there have said they feared creating the sort of panic that has been seen.

“The Chinese government was totally irresponsible in covering it up,” Baltimore said. “We can’t get away from that. It is a demonstration of the value of openness.”

WHO has praised Vietnam for its response — which was to immediately call for international help in handling its own outbreak of SARS. WHO has declared Vietnam to be free of SARS.

“This thing literally never would have happened on anything like the scale it happened if the Chinese had been open about it from the beginning,” Baltimore said.

SARS, caused by a relative of one of the common cold viruses, has infected an estimated 5,300 people in nearly 30 countries. It has a mortality rate of about 6 percent.

But while SARS is new and frightening, its impact, so far, has been minor. In a mild year, influenza and its complications kill an estimated 250,000 people around the world.—Reuters