Fear and Coughing in Toronto: SARS and the Uses of Risk

The 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto offers an opportunity to study the ways risk has come to form a rhetorical basis for public discussions of morality in contemporary Canadian society. This paper combines Ewald’s precautionary description of risk functionality with Douglas’ pollution theories to analyze quantitative and qualitative data taken from a print media content analysis. Precautionary conceptions are pre-eminent at the outset of the story, while pollution formulations become more important when the international community accuses Toronto of hosting a plague. This shift in emphasis between the two risk formulations is linked to a change in story frames from a public-health focus to an economic one. The paper concludes that risk is defined, redefined, and deployed as a moral tool and agent of social control by members of Canada’s information elite.