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Don't want SARS? Wash hands after wiping September 16 2003 at 07:09AM Chicago - There's nothing like the fear of catching a dangerous infectious illness, it seems, to make people do the right thing after using the bathroom. A survey of hand-washing habits in airport restrooms found that travellers were exquisitely fastidious in Toronto, which has just endured an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Elsewhere in North America, though, people were just as slovenly as ever. The survey, released on Monday, is the third conducted by the American Society of Microbiology, which has long campaigned - with little apparent...

TORONTO (CP) - As many as 120 people who aren't on the list of Canada's probable or suspect SARS cases may actually have had the disease, testing done by Health Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory has shown. And experts say it's crucial to find those individuals and figure out whether they actually had SARS and whether they have spread it to others. "It's a worry. It's an important thing to try to figure out why, (and) what this means," said scientific director Dr. Frank Plummer. The Winnipeg lab, in conjunction with Ontario officials and public health authorities in the locations where...

D'Cunha wonders why U.S. has such low SARS numbersPuzzled by lack of American deathsHealth Canada looks for answers OTTAWA — Ontario's chief medical officer of health is raising questions about the credibility of American SARS statistics and has asked Health Canada to seek clarification. Dr. Colin D'Cunha said he's puzzled by the low number of reported SARS cases in the United States, and the fact that no deaths have been reported. "There are cities in the U.S. that are large gateways to Asia and Hong Kong and, yes, we have good health systems and we can catch people but I'm...

Canada Faces SARS Questions With Possible New Toronto Cluster, Link to North Carolina Case The Associated Press TORONTO June 10 — Health authorities in Canada's biggest city scrambled Tuesday to explain possible new SARS cases at one hospital and how a recent visitor from the United States came down with the illness after returning home. The 15 patients showing symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome at a hospital outside Toronto, and the U.S. man with SARS under quarantine at his home near Raleigh, N.C., renewed fears that the World Health Organization could impose another travel warning for the city. At...

CTV.ca News Staff There is more bad news this morning for Canada in the battle against SARS. U.S. officials have confirmed that Toronto has exported a case of the pneumonia-like illness to North Carolina. The 47-year-old man developed a fever and pneumonia after visiting the city. While he did visit a patient in a health care facility, exactly how he contracted SARS is a mystery. The man visited the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in north Toronto on May 16 and 17. Two people who shared the room with the person he visited came down with SARS, but five to...

<p>MONTREAL -- Weary Canadian public health doctors sought yesterday to determine whether a new outbreak of SARS has erupted in greater Toronto, where 33 people have died of the flulike virus and the medical system in the country's biggest metropolis is straining under the burden of the disease.</p>

New SARS outbreak feared at Whitby hospital Fifteen dialysis patients have respiratory symptoms HELEN BRANSWELL CANADIAN PRESS An unexplained cluster of respiratory illnesses at a hospital east of Toronto has Ontario's SARS containment team worried about the possibility of a new outbreak of the disease. Fifteen dialysis patients of the Whitby site of the Lakeridge Health Centre have pneumonia or respiratory symptoms and are under investigation as possible SARS patients, Dr. James Young, Ontario's commissioner of public security, said today. In addition, "there have been some staff reports of illness today which we are looking into," said Dr. Donna Reynolds,...

TORONTO (CP) -- The city's SARS outbreak took a distressing turn Friday with news that a medical resident was likely coming down with SARS when he was present for the delivery of a set of twins at a downtown hospital during a full day's work earlier this week. The health-care worker was believed to be infected May 23 at North York General Hospital and didn't show with symptoms until two days past the 10-day incubation period, said Dr. Donald Low, a key member of the city's SARS containment team. He was showing no symptoms when he assisted in the delivery...

 HELEN BRANSWELLCanadian Press TORONTO (CP) - Intubating SARS patients is such a risky procedure that all hospitals treating SARS patients need to train and specially equip their staff to do them, using protective gear some liken to spacesuits, a variety of experts now insist. Despite using high-level precautions and having had weeks of experience in treating SARS patients, Toronto hospital workers who take part in intubations continue to contract the disease. As recently as the middle of last week, at least two nurses became infected during a relatively easy intubation at North York General Hospital. Given that as many as...

TORONTO - Lord, one hates to take one's cues from the New Democrats, especially here in the pages of the national organ of the right wing, but at times like this, one must put aside one's biases for the greater good. It was the diminutive Marilyn Churley, deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, who said it yesterday in a scrum at Queen's Park. She meant it in the partisan fashion, and was speaking of severe acute respiratory syndrome and what she considers the tepid response of the province's Tory government; I would modify the terms to focus on the bozos...

Guangdong doctor linked to SARS outbreak International effort reveals links between SARS outbreak and Chinese pneumonia, and possible agent. | By Robert Walgate Margaret Chan, Health Director of Hong Kong, said today that the source of the current international outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) seems to be a doctor from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, the southernmost region of China, which saw 300 cases of a mystery pneumonia between November 2002 and February 2003. Chan's comments are reported in the Hong Kong Standard. China only recently agreed to cooperate with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US...

SARS has tested the modern world's ability to corral a contagious, deadly disease. Everybody fighting the outbreak — from the World Health Organization to Toronto public health authorities to Scarborough Grace Hospital — claims they have done the best possible job. Despite valiant efforts, 170 people have died around the world, 13 in Toronto alone. Well over 3,400 are suspected or probably infected, 247 in Ontario. Many thousands had to be placed in quarantine, 7,000 in Toronto. The disease is growing, not shrinking. A detailed analysis shows mistakes were made along the way. Poor detective work was done. Information was...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - "Super-spreaders" of SARS are unlikely to be infected with a particularly virulent form of the virus, a panel of experts said here Saturday at the New York Academy of Sciences. Instead, it seems they spread the disease to so many people because their infection went unrecognized, the panel said. Like other people with SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, such patients are best dealt with by isolation and quarantine, according to the experts. "We saw most clearly in Singapore that secondary cases are linked to other cases and that quarantine can limit transmission," said Dr....

Virus can live 24 hours outside host, study finds By CAROLYN ABRAHAM MEDICAL REPORTER Tuesday, April 22, 2003 Doctors struggling to contain the SARS outbreak have laboured for more than a month under the notion that this insidious virus can live no more than a few hours outside a human host. But disturbing new research has discovered otherwise. Studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that, unlike most respiratory viruses medicine knows, the microbe behind SARS can survive up to 24 hours on inanimate objects, turning any surface into a possible point of transmission. In response,...

Breath tubes spread SARS By ROB GRANATSTEIN - Toronto Sun SARS spread slowing in Asia Toronto doctors have admitted SARS is being spread to health-care workers when tubes are put down patients' throats to help them breathe -- and the physicians don't know how to stop it. Dr. Don Low, chief microbiologist at Mount Sinai hospital, said Toronto's two newest SARS cases that will be reported today are a result of procedures, called intubations, that infected health-care workers last Wednesday. "Intubation is a major issue with SARS patients," Low said. "Why? I don't know why. It's not easily explainable. "We're...

Guests at wake need to be checked Public health officials were worried yesterday a new wave of SARS cases could arise among people who attended a wake last week for a person determined posthumously to have died of SARS. The decision to classify the April 1 death as SARS-related came after several members of the family came down with the disease. That death brings to nine the number of Canadians who have succumbed to SARS since it was first brought to Canada six weeks ago. "There are (still) areas, like the funeral home, clearly ... that could cause a further...

Two more people who were part of the re-emergence of SARS in Toronto last week died in hospital overnight, bringing the nation's death toll to 29. "It is with some regret that I wish to advise all of you that two individuals have passed away with SARS-like symptoms overnight," Ontario's Commissioner of Public Health, Colin D'Cunha, told a news conference Wednesday. He said both women were over the age of 65. Meanwhile, nearly 2,000 people in a Toronto suburb have been asked to go into quarantine after a student attended an area high school with symptoms of SARS. The teenager...

TORONTO--Hospital workers here once again strapped on masks and gowns Saturday to confront a new SARS threat that an official warned could involve 33 people or more, weeks after Canada proclaimed itself free of the deadly virus. Up to 1,000 people are being quarantined after a case spread undetected through a hospital. The reports of a possible new outbreak in Toronto came on a day of rare good news out of Asia, where severe acute respiratory syndrome originated. For the first time since late March, no new cases were reported in Hong Kong on Saturday. Taiwan had no new deaths...

Health ministers from across east Asia came up with a joint plan to fight SARS during a meeting in Malaysia, as hundreds of medical workers in Beijing were forced to sleep in their offices because of hospital-wide quarantines. Elsewhere, the debate over how to treat the flu-like illness intensified. Medical experts from Singapore and Canada — both hit hard by SARS outbreaks — have questioned Hong Kong's use of a cocktail drug treatment for the disease, and one expert wondered whether it might even be harming patients. There have been 19 deaths in Canada, all in the Toronto area. Meanwhile,...