BANGKOK: With fear gripping East Asia over the rapidly spreading atypical pneumonia that has killed 100 people by this week, a steady cough or few sneezes in public can be a ticket to ostracism.

Or as the airline staff on board Thailand’s national carrier are quickly learning, being identified as one who served a flight from high-risk countries such as China or Singapore is enough for them to be treated as outcasts.

“Thai people now look at us as if we were ghosts,” a male flight attendant had written on a Thai Airways website for the cabin crew, revealed a local daily newspaper. “We are treated like the plague because of poor communications and overreaction by the Thai government.”

But such treatment of people “suspected” of having caught Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is not unique to Thailand. In Hong Kong, hotels are turning away guests from mainland China.

In Singapore, health workers seen in public in their white uniforms are being shunned due to news reports that say that among those infected by the killer virus are nurses and medical staff who have treated SARS patients in East Asia.

As of Tuesday, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), China continues to be the worst hit, with 1,268 cases and 53 deaths, followed by Hong Kong, with 883 cases and 23 deaths. Meanwhile Singapore, with 106 cases and eight deaths, is fourth after Canada, with 217 cases and nine deaths.

Thailand, on the other hand, has seven recorded cases and two SARS-related deaths. Health experts in the region are admitting that the panic now in motion is being fuelled by the widespread nature of SARS, which has, since it was announced to the world in early March, spread to 20 countries.

Currently, all continents but Africa have had to handle a SARS case.

There are more than 2,600 cases of SARS worldwide so far.

Since SARS was detected, only four per cent of those infected by it have died, experts point out as they try to counter the panic around the disease. By contrast, the Ebola fever that has been raging for some years has been more deadly, with at least 90 per cent of those infected dying due to the disease.

But this has done little to quell the panic and the accompanying discrimination that people “suspected” of SARS are experiencing.

It is more virulent than what happened during the two previous occasions when Asia was hit by killer diseases. They were the 1994 pneumonic plague that hit Surat, India, and the avian flu that struck Hong Kong mid-1997 through early 1998.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.