- BEIJING (AFP) -- China reported
a new suspected SARS case after releasing its only confirmed patient, as
a team of World Health Organisation experts headed to the south to find
answers.
-
- Officials in the southern province of Guangdong said
a 20-year-old waitress was under quarantine at a hospital in the capital
Guangzhou with symptoms of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
-
- SARS first broke out in China and caused a global crisis
last year, killing about 800 people and infecting around 8,000.
-
- Mainland China was worst affected, followed by Hong Kong,
and the recent cases mark a resurfacing of the pneumonia-like disease.
-
- The woman at centre of the latest case, who reportedly
worked at a wildlife restaurant, developed a fever on December 26 and has
been hospitalized since December 31, a local government statement said.
Her condition was now stable.
-
- The announcement coincided with the discharge from hospital
of a 32-year-old-television journalist, China's first SARS case in six
months.
-
- Medical teams have disinfected the area where the waitress
lived and quarantined 48 people who had close contact with her, while monitoring
another 52 people who had some contact with her. None have shown SARS symptoms
so far.
-
- WHO officials said Thursday they had no further information
on her, but that samples from the woman were in Beijing for testing.
-
- "We'd like more information on it," said Roy
Wadia, a Beijing WHO spokesman.
-
- A WHO spokeswoman from Geneva said Thursday WHO wanted
samples from the woman to be double-checked by an independent laboratory,
like the last case.
-
- Tang Xiaoping, director of the No. 8 People's Hospital
where the woman will be transferred to, said the restaurant where the migrant
worker from central Henan province worked was not specifically a wildlife
restaurant.
-
- But he added: "We don't know if it had wildlife.
Many restaurants do."
-
- The emergence of the latest suspected case should not
be cause for alarm, given the heightened state of alert in China's surveillance
system, said Bob Dietz, another WHO spokesman.
-
- "What's reassuring to us at this point is we seem
to be catching cases ... So it seems the surveillance system is working.
People know what to do when cases show up," Dietz said.
-
- He noted that as with the confirmed case, the patient
was isolated and had apparently not infected anyone else.
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- A WHO team of experts Thursday headed to Guangzhou to
deepen the probe into how the confirmed patient contracted SARS, a task
which another Beijing-based WTO spokesman Roy Wadia said was "of paramount
importance."
-
- Experts will likely revisit the man's apartment compound,
reinterview him and possibly look at the area's rat population and even
study rat faeces, Wadia said.
-
- "There are all these theories, such as that rat
faeces scattered by the wind might be a source of infection. All these
things need to be studied more," he said.
-
- Across the border in Hong Kong, three television reporters
from local broadcaster TVB were in Queen Mary Hospital after showing SARS-like
symptoms following a visit to Guangdong last week to cover the new outbreak.
-
- But preliminary tests Thursday showed two of them did
not have the disease, while results on the third were pending.
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- Guangdong province, meanwhile, offered rewards for people
reporting civet cats, a weasel-like animal found to have a similar virus
as the confirmed patient.
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- Wildlife, particularly civets, are suspected transmitters
of the disease and a massive cull of civets continued Thursday, while a
rat extermination campaign will begin this weekend in Guangzhou.
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