HK hospitals brace for the worst as SARS spreads
Reuters Health Last Updated: 2003-04-07 10:00:54 -0400 (Reuters Health) By Tan Ee Lyn
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A WHO expert said on Monday the course of the deadly respiratory disease SARS appeared to be slowing at its source in southern China, while Hong Kong reported a spate of new cases of the mystery virus that has caused a global health scare.
Two more people died in Singapore of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), state media said on Monday, days after the city-state showed signs of success of subduing the virus that has killed at least 90 people worldwide and infected more than 2,600.
The Hong Kong government said on Monday SARS had infected 41 more people, bringing the total number of cases to 883, and hospitals were bracing for a possible tripling of cases.
The respiratory disease, which originated in China's Guangdong province, hit neighboring Hong Kong in March and has been spread around the world by air travelers.
Robert Breiman, head of a World Health Organization team investigating the outbreak in Guangdong, said on Monday the number of SARS cases was slowing in the province and the virus was showing signs it might be weakening.
"It does look like the disease rates are dropping -- dropping quite a bit," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"The problem isn't extinguished, which would be the nice place to get to. But it's occurring in lower frequency, lower incidence than it was during the peak time in February," he said.
"We're still not ruling out the possibility that the virus itself could become burned out and become less and less transmittable," Breiman said.
Some experts have suggested the SARS virus came from animals and mutated, then jumped to humans, but the team in Guangdong saw no evidence supporting that theory, he said.
SCHOOLS CLOSED
The deadly virus has spread to nearly 20 countries, slashing tourism, canceling events, closing schools and prompting economists to trim growth forecasts for parts of Asia.
Australia added SARS on Monday to a list of diseases requiring quarantine, ranking it as dangerous as cholera and smallpox.
The virus has skirted Europe but Belgium's health ministry said on Monday it was looking into a possible case of SARS after a 56-year-old woman was hospitalized with symptoms of the disease in the port city of Antwerp over the weekend.
Hong Kong Hospital Authority chairman Leong Che-hung, speaking of a worst-case scenario, told local television late on Sunday that health officials were preparing for up to 3,000 cases. He believed there would be sufficient manpower and facilities although intensive care units would be under pressure. Singapore, where eight people have died and which has the world's fourth-highest number of cases, is battling to control SARS from spreading in the city-state's main hospital.
A doctor at Singapore General Hospital was confirmed to be infected, raising fears of a crack in the government's strategy of isolating infected people. Twenty nurses at the hospital are also suspected of having SARS and have been isolated.
The fresh outbreak came after the government imposed strict control measures, placing more than 1,000 under home quarantine and closing schools.
PM'S TRIP CANCELED
Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong canceled a trip to China over the SARS scare, but went ahead with a visit to India, where a health official said the Singapore delegation would be subjected to a health screening, though not Goh himself.
Goh told Singaporeans to learn to live with the virus, because it would not disappear soon.
"What we are saying is this is not the end of the world, there's life. With terrorism, with the Iraqi war, with SARS, we are going to live as near normal a life as possible," he told a news conference.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, whose government is grappling with its first big crisis since taking office in March, said China could control the spread of SARS and welcomed visitors.
Few are likely to heed the assurance. Some foreign health experts in Beijing believe cases there have gone unreported.
The WHO team has been talking to early survivors of the illness trying to find how, or if, the virus -- new to science and possibly belonging to a family of viruses that cause the common cold -- made the leap from animals, possibly domesticated pigs and ducks.
SARS symptoms include high fever, chills and breathing difficulties, and the disease has a mortality rate of about 4 percent, roughly the same as measles. By comparison, tens of thousands die every year in the United States from various strains of influenza.
The WHO's Breiman balked at suggestions the outbreak was under control, as the Chinese government has said publicly on several occasions.
"I think that term 'under control' keeps getting people into various kinds of trouble. To me, that's not so much the issue as whether or not people are taking all the appropriate steps that are available to us at the moment," he said.
Breiman said the team would head back to Beijing on Tuesday pleased with its work in Guangdong, but had not solved the puzzle of how the disease originated and became an epidemic.
"I don't think that we, ourselves, during this time will have the answers. Of course, we didn't really expect that we would. It's too big of a set of questions and it's the people that have the data themselves that have to come up with the answers."
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