Posted on 04/18/2003 1:26:08 AM PDT by sarcasm
The killer came through the pipes. Hong Kong's largest cluster of a deadly flu-like illness was spread through leaky drains in an apartment building visited by a man infected with the disease, health officials said yesterday. The puzzling outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, at the Amoy Gardens apartment complex was traced to a mainland Chinese man suffering from diarrhea who visited his brother there in March, the besieged city's health secretary said. Faulty seals between a sewage drain and water pipes enabled the ill man to spread the virus when he used the bathroom - eventually infecting 324 people in the complex, officials said. The leaky pipes explain the baffling spread of the disease in the E Block of the Amoy Gardens complex, where scores of people on one side of the building got sick even though they had little or no contact with each other. Sixty-five people in Hong Kong have died from SARS - caused by a deadly relative of the common cold virus - and nearly 1,300 people in the sprawling city have contracted the illness. Globally, 165 people have died and 3,389 have been infected, according to the World Health Organization, a UN agency. Case estimates lowered In the U.S., the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sharply lowered the number of estimated SARS patients yesterday, creating a new category of 35 probable cases among 208 suspected cases. There have been no deaths in the U.S. Before yesterday, the CDC used a broader definition than other countries, one based on symptoms and travel history, to flag SARS carriers. But new diagnostic tests allow doctors to detect only genuine cases, CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said. "We did cast a very wide net early on. We know that we have more people in the net than truly have SARS [in the U.S.]," she said, noting the new category was created so as not to "exaggerate the scope of the problem."
His diarrhea got into the drinking water pipes. That is disgusting, even without SARS.
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