Robert Baker: We are in the grip of an epidemic, but it is not Sars

Deadly conditions such as malaria, Aids and heart disease are being ignored while the world overreacts to the new virus

Your best friend is an alcoholic heroin addict who has run up unpayable debts with the mafia. One cold wintry day he proposes going out. He says he is going to see Tony Soprano to demand some more money to score some smack. You launch into an uncontrollable, hysterical screaming fit about how he should be wearing a proper vest.

This is pretty much my assessment of the media coverage of the Sars epidemic to date. Could everybody not just calm down for one moment? The Government is failing to act and should be making Sars a notifiable disease like anthrax, say some papers. It's from outer space, says the expert from Sheffield with the suspiciously Viz-like name, Dr Milton Wainwright. Sars could be bigger than Aids and our only hope is to mount an immediate aggressive global response at the highest levels, says Dr Patrick Dixon, an expert in predicting global trends at the London Business School's Centre for Management Development. We're all doomed, says a Walmington-on-Sea based spokesman for the Home Guard.

Please excuse my apparent facetiousness in the face of a serious world health issue. It is, of course, true that some 290 people have died since this problem was identified and at least 4,800 have been infected. There has been a Chernobyl-like cover-up in China. The disease may be caught by casual contact. It has taken a hold in some Western cities. There is no cure or vaccine. But "the first global epidemic of the 21st century"? Hang on, we haven't finished with the old ones yet.

Let us take a cold look at some other figures that might put Sars into perspective. Since you began reading this article several people have died of malaria, probably children; 3,000 more will be dead by tomorrow. Nearly three million more people will have died of tuberculosis by the end of 2003; the progress of resistant disease is unstoppable. Forty million people have died of Aids.

Nor can we in the West be complacent. Ordinary influenza kills between 20,000 and 30,000 in the United States every year, and proportionately similar numbers in the UK. Our neighbours in eastern Europe are undergoing a catastrophic rise in HIV incidence. Hospital-acquired infection with antibiotic-resistant strains of common bacteria has reached epidemic levels in some UK hospitals. Blood-borne infection with resistant bacteria such as MRSA – methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus – has an almost identical proportional mortality to smallpox: about 30 per cent.

Doctors who are involved with management of these infections and wish to educate the public about them grow weary of beating the same old drum to the same old indifference from the press. None of this is news these days. Is anyone in Fleet Street interested in World TB Day any more? HIV's almost a non-story nowadays. May I remind you of the Sars figures in Britain to date? Six people have been identified as probable Sars cases. Six. Not 6,000, not 60. Six. None has died. In some countries, the incidence of HIV exceeds 30 per cent, and cases in London are increasing by 10 to 15 per cent per year.

You could reasonably argue that none of the figures for major infective killers, shocking as they are, has any influence on our response to Sars. This is a new disease, an entirely new virus that can be picked up in aeroplanes and affects affluent Westerners rather than penniless African children. Health workers such as doctors and nurses can be infected and some have died. Some say a handshake is enough, or touching a lift button. Nobody has natural immunity to this variety of coronavirus, which makes it a ready candidate for a widespread pandemic. It has a recognised mortality rate, now believed to be about one in 15. I could be wrong – we may be in for a new Black Death, although the evidence so far suggests not, and the agent may not even be as infectious as first thought.

But do we really gain anything by some of the overwrought headlines we have read in the last week? What possible virtue is there in panic? You can make a very short list of the people who benefit from this kind of knicker-twisting. Publicity-hungry "experts" from obscure institutions. Manufacturers of "protective" face masks. (Check out the ads for a respirator offering reliable protection against anthrax, biological agents, Sars and pollution: £9.99. Sorry, guys, but it probably doesn't work.) Journalists who have been kicking their heels since Iraq petered out so disappointingly, and editors with rather forlorn-looking empty front pages. Perhaps we need a constant sump for our free-floating anxiety. Saddam has inconveniently disappeared. What's next? Does anyone remember the thriving market in helmets when Skylab was about to crash to earth?

And have we learnt nothing from the recent past? An entire, proud industry was virtually destroyed in the name of CJD. The country was visited as though by a biblical plague, an already struggling rural economy was kicked in the teeth. I attended a lecture at the Royal College of Physicians at the height of the BSE crisis, given by one of the Government's most senior advisers on CJD, Professor Roy Anderson, who has also recently reported on Sars. He predicted deaths on a large scale from CJD. While I have every sympathy for the victims of this dreadful condition, and their relatives, and do not wish to minimise their suffering, the projected epidemic never came. We are, however in the middle of a separate epidemic – of heart disease caused by our diet, including beef. But that's not news.

Then there was foot and mouth. A complacent government failed to act and yet another plague was visited on our countryside. I wonder if this recent episode is fuelling our hysteria? Hard to know what lessons we can draw for Sars, as that crisis arose because there is no veterinary Health Protection Agency. There is no possibility of ring-vaccination against Sars. Perhaps someone will propose a contiguous cull.

The Government's Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, has got it right. We should be vigilant but calm. Clinicians up and down the country are alert to the condition – how could they fail to be? Making the disease notifiable is an irrelevant bureaucratic nicety under the circumstances. We have probably the best public health service (recently renamed the Health Protection Agency) in the world. Shouldn't we listen to it? In the words of another spokesman from Walmington-on-Sea: "Don't panic!"

Dr Robert Baker is a specialist in infectious diseases at King's College Hospital, London