By Jeremy Laurance and Chris Bunting
20 March 2003
Independent (UK)
Two new cases of a deadly strain of pneumonia being spread across the world by air travel have been identified in Britain, the Department of Health said last night.
A man was in a specialist isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London and a patient in Swansea, south Wales, was being treated at home.
The London man, said to be in a stable condition, arrived at Heathrow from Taiwan on Monday on a Cathay Pacific flight after a one-hour stop in Hong Kong. Air passengers travelling from the Far East who have experienced symptoms such as a high fever or difficulties breathing are being advised to contact their doctor.
Alarm about the virus has mounted. It appears to have spread from China, Hong Kong and South-east Asia, with 264 cases identified worldwide. Fourteen deaths have been linked to the virus. However, hopes of effective treatment were boosted yesterday by claims from researchers that they had identified the family of viruses to which the infectious agent responsible belonged.
World Health Organisation (WHO) officials said the disease was being brought under control. David Heymann, head of communicable diseases, said: "The outbreak, we feel, is on its way to containment, at least outside of Vietnam and Hong Kong, and China if it is linked."
Doctors in Hong Kong claimed they had identified the virus which causes the illness, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome or Sars. Dr John Tam, professor of microbiology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the virus had been found in patient samples using an electron microscope. "From its shape, it belongs to the paramyxoviridae family," he said. The paramyxoviridae family includes viruses which cause a number of different diseases in humans, including measles, usually involving respiratory symptoms.
Similar claims were made by a German team in Frankfurt.
A paramyxovirus called Nipah, discovered in 1999, caused an eight-month outbreak of illness in Malaysia that infected 265 people, of whom 105 died. Almost all those affected had been exposed to pigs and the main symptom was brain inflammation.
A second paramyxovirus, called Hendra, caused three small outbreaks in Australia in the 1990s. Some of those victims had contact with horses. The WHO urged caution in response to yesterday's claims, but said the paramyxovirus theory was being taken seriously.
"It will become clear with specific testing of patients to see if we can pull out particles of that virus from the blood," Dr Heymann said.
Specialists said that, even if the Hong Kong and Frankfurt teams were correct, it could be months before the precise infectious agent was identified.
Sars claimed three more lives yesterday, including a French doctor who died in Vietnam after treating an American man diagnosed with the illness, who also died. It has killed five people in Hong Kong, two in Vietnam and two in Canada. Eleven possible cases have been identified in America. The first suspected case in Britain earlier this week involved a man aged 64 from the Manchester area.