Jackie Sandoz isn’t worried about getting sick—she’s more concerned with today’s exam.
Sandoz is one of the hundreds of medical students at U of T who’ve seen their faculty thrown into chaos by the outbreak of a mysterious disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
“It seems like they really don’t know what to do,” she said yesterday. Which is odd, according to Sandoz, because “they’re usually really good at listening to us—this is kind of uncharacteristic.”
Around 8 p.m. last Thursday, Sandoz was among the hundreds of first-year med students who received an e-mail from their faculty informing them classes would be cancelled on Friday, and an exam scheduled on Monday for first-year med students would be postponed indefinitely.
“Everyone went out Thursday night and partied,” said Sandoz. “Med students are like any other students—if you tell them they don’t have the exam, they’re not going to study.”
By Friday evening, however, the party was over.
“The e-mail we received on Friday night said the exam was back on,” said Mildred Wong, a second-year med student. While Wong herself isn’t affected, she worries students will suffer academically if disruptions continue. “Personally,” she said, “it hasn’t been too disruptive yet, but if they cancelled classes Monday, that would be more of a problem.”
“As you can imagine,” Sandoz wrote in an e-mail, “we were not very impressed with the way the school handled it.”
The exam rescheduling fiasco is just one example of the difficulties U of T’s medical school has had during the SARS outbreak. Faculty members and—according to rumours—at least one upper-year med student have been quarantined to prevent further spread of the disease. Classes normally held at area teaching hospitals have been cancelled, and many first-year students are no longer allowed contact with patients.
The health risks for med students have been quite low, which is why most seem more concerned about academics than the possibility of exposure to an unknown disease
“Hopefully, our exposure’s been limited, due to all the precautions,” said Sean Mullin, a second-year med student and Governing Council member. “I don’t think there is a large concern at the moment.”
“I don’t think they need to worry,” said Dr. Jay Keystone, president of the U of T Medical Alumni Association and a specialist in tropical diseases. “I think the only reason they would need to worry would be if it turned out that one of the cases they had seen was a SARS case. To my knowledge, at Toronto General Hospital, all the SARS cases are quarantined, and the same thing is going on at Mount Sinai.”
“The bottom line,” concluded Dr. Keystone, “is if the student was involved in a case where someone was not quarantined, and subsequently turned out to have SARS…the student would have to be quarantined.”
Neither Dr. David Naylor, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, or Dr. Rick Frecker, associate dean of undergraduate medical education, were available for comment. A public relations official at U of T said that both had been busier than usual as the outbreak grew last week.
As of Sunday, four Canadians have died from SARS, and dozens more are infected. Worldwide, 1,500 people are estimated to be suffering from the mysterious disease, and more than 50 have died. In Canada, hundreds of people who may have come in contact with the disease, particularly health-care workers, have been quarantined in their homes.
Identified first in Guangdong Province in China, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam, SARS made its way to Toronto via flights from Asia and Vancouver. The province of Ontario has declared a health emergency in response, and two hospitals, Scarborough Grace and York Central, have been closed until further notice.
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
