Posted on 04/19/2003 12:17:58 PM PDT by per loin
China has recorded one more SARS fatality, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, raising the country's death toll from the disease to 67, while 48 new SARS cases have been found, state media said Saturday.
The new cases were revealed following an order by China's new President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao for all levels of government to come clean after widespread accusations abroad of a systematic cover-up.
China will soon report figures for cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that are much higher than previously reported, a well-placed source said Saturday.
A World Health Organization expert in Beijing also said Saturday Chinese officials had alerted WHO officials to an imminent announcement of higher figures.
"They told us in the next couple of days, they will make an announcement of (more) cases. ... They said it would be much higher but I don't know what that means," Jeffrey McFarland told AFP.
The China News Service (CNS) said the latest death was announced by the Sichuan health department Friday, taking the number of fatalities in the province to two. No detail was given on the victim.
State media also reported 48 new cases of SARS, with a majority of the cases coming from northern Shanxi province while Jilin province in the northeast reported its first cases.
The figures included some suspected cases, but most were confirmed, reports said.
Shanxi province, where the number of reported cases appears to be rising faster than anywhere else in China, reported 38 new cases Friday, bringing the total number in the province to 140, with 95 confirmed and 35 suspected, CNS said, quoting the provincial health department.
The province's capital, Taiyuan, has ordered all elementary and middle schools to shut down for three weeks until May 8 to keep the disease from further spreading, the report said.
On Friday, Jilin province reported its first cases, according to the People's Daily website. It cited an announcement by the provincial government saying the two suspected SARS cases have been found.
They were sisters: one of them had looked after a pregnant woman two weeks ago in a Beijing hospital which was treating atypical pneumonia cases. She came down with a fever and cough after returning home and apparently spread her illness to her elder sister.
Sichuan province in southwest China, meanwhile, reported three new cases; Ningxia in the north also reported three more cases and Henan province in central China reported two new cases.
To curb the spread of SARS, Yinchuan city in Ningxia has decided to temporarily shut down all Internet cafes, night clubs, discos, cinemas and places that play VCDs and DVDs in three districts of the city, CNS said.
The businesses will not be allowed to reopen until May 8 or even later, depending on the situation with SARS.
The World Health Organization put the cumulative number of cases in China at 1,482 and 65 deaths as of Friday morning, but its toll apparently did not include the first death reported in Sichuan the previous day.
The new figures reported by state media Saturday bring the total number of cases in China to 1,530.
Chinese papers Saturday reported on Prime Minister Wen's promise Friday of full and timely reports on SARS. "A responsible government must always put the interest of the people as top priority," Wen was quoted by China Central Television as saying during a visit to Beijing schools.
The scorpion may really want to cross the river but a scorpion is still a scorpion with a scorpion's nature.
1 hour, 14 minutes ago Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo! 04/19/03
By Michael Battye
BEIJING (Reuters) - Twelve people died in Hong Kong on Saturday from the SARS (news - web sites) virus, a record for a single day, and the World Health Organization (news - web sites) said it feared patients in the former British territory may be harder-hit by the microbe than elsewhere.
Singapore said Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome threatened to become its biggest crisis since independence, while China, where the virus is believed to have originated last year, intensified its newly declared open war on the disease and threatened to punish officials covering up cases.
Neighboring Vietnam said it was considering closing its long border with China to keep the virus out.
In Canada, the only country outside Asia where people have died from the outbreak, health authorities reported one more death, bringing to 14 the number of people who have died from the virus.
In Hong Kong, the latest deaths took the toll to a world-leading 81 just a day after the territory's leader, Tung Chee-hwa, said the outbreak would "stabilize gradually."
It has now had 1,358 cases of SARS, almost as many as on the Chinese mainland where the deadly virus first appeared in the southern province of Guangdong.
The disease, which is fatal in about four percent of cases and has no known cure, has killed more than 200 people and infected nearly 3,500 around the world.
The WHO, which has teams in China investigating the outbreak, said key questions they are probing include the most likely course of the illness as it is passed on to others, and which body fluids transmit the virus.
SARS is passed in droplets, by coughing and sneezing, but the WHO is not ruling out the possibility that it may also be transmitted when people touch objects such as elevator buttons, or that it could be passed on in fecal matter.
PANDEMIC UNLIKELY
But the WHO said the threat of a global pandemic was dwindling.
"The vast majority of countries reporting probable SARS cases are dealing with a small number of imported cases," the WHO said in an update on its Web site at http://www.who.int.
"Experience has shown that when these cases are promptly detected, isolated, and managed according to strict procedures of infection control, further spread to hospital staff and family members either does not occur at all or results in a very small number of secondary infections," it said.
But the WHO said it was concerned about the outbreaks in Hong Kong and Canada.
"In Hong Kong, a large and sudden cluster of almost simultaneous cases (321) seen in residents of the Amoy Gardens housing estate has raised the possibility of transmission from an environmental source," it said.
"The disease appears to be more severe both in Amoy residents and in related cases among hospital staff. Around 20 percent of Amoy-related cases require intensive care, compared with 10 percent seen in non-Amoy cases. Some deaths are now occurring in younger, previously healthy persons as well as in the elderly and persons with underlying disease."
It could be that these patients have exceptionally high levels of virus in their bodies, the health body said, or the virus may have mutated. "Viruses in the Coronavirus family are known to mutate frequently," it said.
NEW CANADIAN OUTBREAK WORRYING
In Canada, the WHO worried about an outbreak among 31 people including members of a religious group, their relatives and health care workers who treated them.
"The outbreak is particularly disturbing because of its potential to move into the wider community," it said.
On Saturday, a Toronto hospital closed its trauma unit on fears that health workers might have been infected.
But a second hospital on the outskirts of Canada's largest city reopened its emergency unit and said its efforts to contain the outbreak had apparently been successful.
A group of British boarding schools quarantined dozens of children arriving back from Asia for the new term, whisking them into isolation.
And a warning came from the Netherlands that SARS is not the only new disease waiting to launch itself into the population. A veterinarian died of pneumonia after catching the poultry disease bird flu, raising fears that a mutated version of the virus could cause an epidemic in people.
Many influenza epidemics originate in birds, and in 1997 Hong Kong officials slaughtered millions of chickens, ducks and other birds after that illness killed six people and infected 18. But a WHO spokesman noted that the Netherlands bird flu did not appear to spread easily from human to human -- which limits the ability of a germ to cause an epidemic. (Additional reporting by Eric Onstad in Amsterdam, Richard Hubbard in Singapore and Carrie Lee in Hong Kong and Nguyen Nhat Lam in Hanoi)
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