READ!! SARS - Waiting For The Cure

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Mark White <tausyankee () optusnet com au>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 22:03:46 +1000
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] SARS - Waiting For The Cure

David,

The information in the article is out of date...I strongly suggest you tell
your readers to visit the cdc web site. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/

This is a mutated version of the common cold, with a 4 percent mortality
rate. 30 cases were reported in the past 30 hours or so in Hong Kong, with
outbreaks now in Bejing as well. The Hong Kong hospital system is
approaching crisis, as health workers fall ill.


      China sharply raises death toll from SARS
      Elisabeth Rosenthal The New York Times
      Thursday, March 27, 2003

It reports 31 deaths by end of February

GUANGZHOU, China Chinese health officials Wednesday dramatically increased
their estimates of the number of cases and deaths in China caused by a new
mystery pneumonia that international health officials believe originated
here late last year.

Officials in Guangdong Province, the center of China's epidemic, reporting
an estimated 792 cases and 31 deaths as of the end of February, a rise from
the 305 case and 5 deaths they had previously reported.

The new tallies means that China now probably has had more cases and deaths
than any other country, although the latest estimates have not been
officially sanctioned by China's Ministry of Health or reviewed by
international health officials. About 500 cases have been reported elsewhere
in the world.

The new figures are being released just days after a World Health
Organization team arrived in China to help investigate this country's
epidemic of the mystery pneumonia, which goes by the name SARS, for severe
acute respiratory syndrome. For months, Chinese official tried to hide the
problem, health experts said, and in recent weeks world health officials
have applied increasing pressure to China to improve their cooperation and
statistical reporting on the new disease.

While all other countries that have experienced cases of the new pneumonia,
including Vietnam, Singapore and Canada, send daily updates of cases and
deaths to the World Health Organization, China has been consistently
unwilling or unable to provide such information, even though it is vital to
tracking the disease's spread.

Even Wednesday's newly revised estimates, which officials of the World
Health Organization praised as a "great step forward," cover only cases
through the end of February and provide no information about cases in the
past four weeks. The previous tallies covered only cases reported up to Feb.
10.

"We want to keep the spotlight on folks here and to encourage them to be
part of the solution," said Dr. Rob Breiman, of the International Center of
Diarrheal Disease Research Bangladesh, who is a member of the World Health
Organization team currently in China.

"We want to use the incredible amount of information they have collected
here to help solve the problem."

The international health officials first sat down Tuesday with their Chinese
counterparts to look at the internal data concerning the epidemic and said
they were generally impressed with how the Chinese had investigated and
sought to control the disease. But they noted that data was painfully slow
in emerging from that system. World Health Organization officials in Beijing
say they have still not been given statistics on the disease in other
provinces, despite repeated requests.

In China disease statistics are often regarded as politically sensitive and
are not publicly released.

China first began providing information on its epidemic to the World Health
Organization only about two weeks ago. Doctors and officials in southern
China said that it started in November, peaked in mid-February, and that the
number of cases had fallen off dramatically in March. But the country has
not provided recent data to support these claims.

Just Wednesday, Beijing acknowledged nine cases of the disease and three
deaths in the capital. As of last week, senior city health officials were
still vehemently denying that Beijing had cases, despite the fact that two
patients had died of a suspicious pneumonia at the People's Liberation Army
302 Hospital, and several doctors and nurses had fallen ill.

Chinese health officials have recommended no special precautions against the
virus to the general public, though.

In Singapore, which has about 70 cases, all of them recent, health officials
have quarantined more than 700 people with flu-like symptoms and ordered all
schools closed through April 6. In Hong Kong, where many people have taken
to wearing masks in crowded spaces, health officials reported 30 new cases
in the past 24 hours, almost all of them hospitalized with pneumonia.

Scientists are still uncertain about the germ that causes the disease, which
has sickened more than a thousand people worldwide, although the most likely
candidate is now the corona virus, a class of viruses which causes the
common cold in humans as well as a variety of illnesses in animals,
including pigs and chickens.

Many new viral diseases originate by jumping to humans from animal
populations.

Rural areas of southern China are well-known among virologists as a breeding
ground for new viruses, presumably because humans and farm animals live in
close proximity there.

The germ generally requires extremely close contact for spread, and health
care workers as well as family members of sick patients have been the groups
by far most infected. But there is also evidence that the disease can spread
in poorly ventilated spaces, such as airplanes.

On Tuesday, nine members of a Hong Kong tour group were reportedly ill with
the disease, after flying on an Air China flight to Beijing that was
carrying a man who had the illness. Chinese aviation officials were
Wednesday attempting to contact hundreds of other passengers on the flight.

Wednesday's new statistics were release by provincial health officials here
and have not yet been sanctioned yet by China's Ministry of Health. Some
scientists who have been in discussions with the ministry expect they will
be revised upwards yet again over the next few days, especially as reports
of more recent cases and of cases from other provinces trickle in.

With little hard information about the disease released by China's
government, rumors of new cases have run wild in China's cities. The Chinese
press has been banned from reporting on the topic.

 Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune


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