"The SARS virus can be combated by organizational anti-epidemic measures," he argued.
He voiced the doubt that a medicine against atypical pneumonia would be developed very soon. "A specific medicine will hardly appear and the obtaining active anti-viral preparations should now be put to use", Vorobyev is sure.
He thinks high of the on-going efforts in Russia to prevent the spread of SARS. "Last year we registered only one, dubious at that, case of SARS, while in the United States 300 people have fallen ill. It is an indication of the high level of our anti-epidemic service," said the academician.
In his opinion, the second SARS wave in China is due to the insufficient information "about the circulators of the virus because some of them do not have the disease but can transmit the agent".
Vorobyev says cats and birds, which are circulators of the emerging coronavirus strain may infect men.
Simultaneously, Anatoli Vorobyev rejected the idea that the spread of SARS was a manifestation of bioterrorism because more dangerous viruses ware in existence for it.
He believes the danger of atypical pneumonia is very much inflated by the mass media. There is a host of infectious diseases caused by other viruses, he argues.
Thus, about two billion people in the world are been infected by viruses of parenteral hepatitis affecting liver. There are hundreds of thousands of cases of hepatitis type B and C in Russia, Vorobyev said.
Second after it in disease incidence is the HIV, infecting over 400 million people worldwide. 240,000 HIV cases have been registered in Russia.
"So far, there are not good medicines in existence for parenteral hepatitis and the HIV", he noted.
Clamidiosis is the third infectious disease after them, Vorobyev continued.
Infectious diseases in the world constitute 70 percent of the registered disease incidence, stressed Academician Anatoli Vorobyev.
