- TAIPEI (Reuters) -- A researcher
at a military hospital in Taiwan has tested positive for SARS, and had
possibly contracted the deadly virus in the laboratory where he worked,
officials said on Wednesday.
-
- A health department official in Taipei said the patient
had traveled to Singapore just days earlier for a seminar, but authorities
in Singapore said there were no signs of new SARS cases or infections in
the city state.
-
- Nevertheless stocks in Taiwan fell as much as two percent
on the news. Singapore shares also dipped by about one percent.
-
- The lethal respiratory disease spread dramatically in
the first half of the year, killing more than 800 people -- mostly in China,
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Canada -- and causing chaos in many Asian
economies.
-
- Health authorities have warned there could be a resurgence
of the virus in the Northern Hemisphere winter.
-
- A health department official in Taiwan said the latest
victim, a 44-year-old research worker, had most probably caught the virus
in the laboratory of a Taipei hospital where he worked.
-
- "The patient had an accident in his lab on December
5 because he was hurrying to complete an experiment before going to Singapore,"
said Su Ih-jen, director of the Center for Disease Control at the Department
of Health.
-
- The patient started to run a fever after his return on
December 10 from Singapore, where he had attended an academic seminar.
He was now stable and having no difficulty breathing, Su said.
-
- Singapore, which has taken stringent precautions to avoid
a recurrence of the disease, was quick to clarify that it had no new infections.
-
- "There are no signs at all of any new cases here,"
Karen Tan, a spokeswoman at the Ministry of Health, said.
-
- Singapore's last known SARS case was that of a 27-year-old
medical student who caught the disease in September while studying the
virus at a government-run laboratory. He later recovered.
-
- Authorities in Taiwan said there was little chance of
the virus spreading.
-
- "I urge the public not to panic as this is just
an isolated case that occurred from an accident in a laboratory,"
said Chen Chien-jen, the island's minister of health.
-
- "The patient's family members have been confined
to their home and haven't developed any symptoms. The chances of it spreading
to the greater population are not high."
-
- SARS emerged in southern China at around this time last
year, and spread by air travel to infect 8,000 people in nearly 30 countries
before the World Health Organization declared the end of the outbreak on
July 5.
-
- Most scientists say SARS probably spread from farms in
China, perhaps jumping from animals such as civet cats, ducks, pigs and
rats to humans. Experts say the biggest risk now is of another species
jump from animals to humans.
-
- China's Health Ministry said it had not heard of the
latest case in Taiwan. Although there has been an outbreak of fever, coughs
and sore throats in some Beijing schools, there were no cases of SARS,
the official Xinhua news agency said.
-
- "The upper respiratory tract infection is peaking
in Beijing due to the drastic falling temperatures, but no students have
been hospitalized because of the infection," He Xiong, deputy director
of Beijing Municipal Diseases Prevention and Control Center, was quoted
as saying.
-
- "About 40 primary and middle schools had reported
mass fevers since the start of the winter, but SARS had been ruled out
in all cases after testing," the agency said.
-
- - Additional reporting by Jason Szep in Singapore and
Nick Macfie in Beijing
-
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