[11th_VA]

Your mother was right, wash your hands ...

[11th_VA]

And don't let your pets do this ...

[Cicero]

Thank you, China, for covering this up for more than three months.

[SauronOfMordor]

Rats and cockroaches also may have spread SARS, but only incidentally after they picked it up around the apartments, Yeoh told a news conference.

Sounds like a nice, upscale building (/sarcasm)

We'd better not have an outbreak in our inner-city "project" buildings

[mewzilla]

Can upper respiratory tract viruses be spread through contact wirth feces? I didn't even know virus was shed in the feces.

[honway]

The CDC reported 149 cases in the U.S. on 7 Apr.

199 cases were reported on 15 Apr.

This is the first week the cases have not doubled since the CDC started tracking SARS in the U.S. This is a good sign, imo.

[per loin]

it apparently moved up through people's bathroom drains when U-shaped water seals dried out

That would only happen if no one was using the plumbing fixture for a considerable length of time. Hong Kong is not in the Sahara.

[Sweet_Sunflower29]

A SARS patient with diarrhea infected other people...as the disease apparently spread into homes through a sewage pipe linked to poorly sealed water drains, an official report said Thursday.

Good heavens, how many different methods of transmission there can be?

From the World Health Organization;

Wednesday, 16 April 2003 Press briefing:

Close personal contact is the major way that we believe this disease is spread, from person to person, sitting next to you or just in front of you, by something that comes from you that lands on them, as you speak or as you cough.

[First Amendment]

The pneumonia-like illness has killed at least 166 people and infected about 1,300 worldwide.

What's with these figures???? I will go search for new SARS articles but aren't these numbers way low??

[MissBaby]

The reporting here and lack of familiarity is leaving a bit of a misconception in how SARS spreads through pipes.

The way the bathrooms are set up in Asia is the bathroom floor has a vent/drain. You can literally hose your bathroom clean and the water washing down the floor drain. The drain also acts as a vent for the tub/shower.

Anyone that has lived over there, anyone from the U.S. or other Western Country, knows to put a wet towel over the vent becuase sometimes you get an odor from it.

I'm certainly no expert in how SARS spreads, but these pipes are more akin to vents than they are to pipes. They are actually an air to air vent and all the aparments are linked by them.

Not sure how much difference this makes to anyone except that you can bet now that Westerners are not the only one sealing off that little floor drain/vent.