- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Governments
around the world tightened their defenses against a frightening new respiratory
disease on Thursday, with Singapore deploying surveillance cameras and
the United States broadening its definition of who is at risk.
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- Hospital workers in Hong Kong said the epidemic of Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome had pushed the territory's health care system
to the brink of collapse.
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- But scientists said they had pinned down the virus that
causes SARS and could finish work on an easy diagnostic test, and U.S.
legislators pushed for an extra $150 million to strengthen worldwide surveillance
networks to defend against future outbreaks.
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- Worldwide, more than 110 people have died and nearly
3,000 have been infected.
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- A quarter of Hong Kong's 1,000 cases of SARS, marked
by fever, cough and severe pneumonia, are health workers, including 12
diagnosed with the illness on Thursday.
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- "I am afraid that if more hospital staff get infected,
the entire health care system would collapse," Peter Wong, a spokesman
for three major nurses unions, told a news conference. He said Hong Kong
government hospitals were not providing staff with adequate protective
gear.
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- The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
the World Health Organization recommend health-care workers treating respiratory
patients wear a mask and gloves to protect themselves.
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- MORE HONG KONG DEATHS
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- The Hong Kong government said three more people died
of SARS, bringing the toll to 30, and officials feared the illness could
spread further through the city's crowded apartment towers.
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- WHO teams were in Beijing and in China's Guangdong province,
the source of the infection, but WHO infectious disease chief Dr. David
Heymann said they would like permission to look further. "China is
a worrisome area because don't know what is going on outside Beijing,"
he said in an interview.
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- Singapore slapped a quarantine on arriving foreign workers
and took drastic measures to enforce quarantine orders on hundreds of people
suspected of exposure to SARS, including mounting "Webcams" in
homes and threatening to use electronic wrist bands.
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- "We are facing an unprecedented situation. We are
dealing with a serious, unseen threat," said Singapore's minister
of manpower, Lee Boon Yang.
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- Indonesia said it banned 8,000 workers from traveling
to SARS-hit countries and Russia advised its citizens against traveling
to SARS-affected areas.
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- The United States widened its definition of people at
risk of SARS, saying anyone who passed through an airport in an affected
country should watch for symptoms of respiratory illness and contact a
doctor immediately if they developed fever or cough.
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- "If you are a passenger traveling from an unaffected
part of the world and you go through an airport in a country, say like
Hong Kong, where the disease is being transmitted, you could come into
contact with someone who is infected," CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding
told a news conference.
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- The CDC also said it would be more proactive in screening
people who have been in contact with SARS patients. "Rather than asking
people to contact a clinician if they develop an illness, we are going
to work with (state) health departments so that we contact the contacts
and check in periodically," Gerberding said.
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- AGGRESSIVE CONTAINMENT
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- "I think this a very sensible way for being more
aggressive about containment."
-
- The CDC believes its strict measures and broad definition
of who is a suspected SARS patient has helped keep the disease from spreading
in the United States. Gerberding said there were 166 suspected SARS cases
in 30 states.
-
- CDC and European researchers both said they had come
closer to proving that a new virus from the coronavirus family causes SARS.
They found the virus, which may have jumped from animals to humans, in
most patients with SARS.
-
- They proposed naming it Urbani SARS-associated coronavirus
after Dr. Carlo Urbani, who treated the first identified SARS victims in
Hanoi and who later himself died of SARS.
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- The CDC has developed three experimental tests for the
virus and is working to get a licensed version that can be used widely,
although Gerberding said it would be at least a week and probably longer.
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- Once a test is widely available doctors can more easily
diagnose SARS and can start to learn if people can carry the virus -- and
perhaps pass it on -- without being ill.
-
- Reports abounded that people of Chinese and other Asian
origin were being discriminated against. On Thursday Canadian Prime Minister
Jean Chretien dined in Toronto's Chinatown to help dispel fears.
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- Ten people have died of SARS in Toronto with 253 cases
nationwide.
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- "It is very important for people to appreciate that
this is a respiratory illness that is caused by a virus, probably a new
virus," Gerberding said. "It is not a disease that is in any
way related to being Asian."
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