Posted on 04/30/2003 7:58:11 AM PDT by CobaltBlue
Not only that, but it appears there are not any seriously ill cases either.
I had not read that about the death. I wonder if that person was Asian?
MrLeRoy is no doubting pinging the wod list as we speak.
Except he will find a way to discount your required admission. LOL
TORONTO (CP) - Canadian testing for the coronavirus believed to cause SARS has turned up a troubling finding: a significant proportion of people who weren't diagnosed with SARS tested positive for the virus, the head of Health Canada's microbiology laboratory told an international congress on the disease Wednesday.
Dr. Frank Plummer told scientists, public health officials and government authorities from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Britain and Southeast Asia that his lab has found the virus in specimens from about 14 per cent of people who were under investigation for SARS but who never met the case definition. Some had had exposure to a case or had travelled to affected regions; some did not.
"These 14 per cent . . . we need to understand what the meaning of that is," Plummer said. "They're an interesting group and of concern because those are individuals who don't meet the clinical case definition of SARS.
"That may mean there's a fair bit of mild illness caused by this coronavirus that we're not recognizing. And I think it will mean that it will be much harder to control with quarantine and isolation if the coronavirus is the whole story."
That said, Plummer admitted that at this point there is no evidence these asymptomatic people - if they did have a mild case of SARS - could pass the virus to others who might then become sick with the disease.
"Right now the evidence is, as far as we know, that they're not. There doesn't seem to be any secondary transmission. But our information is still pretty sketchy. So we are actively looking into that question. It is a concern."
Sharing such information is the aim of this two-day meeting. Health Canada officials said the idea is to share the lessons learned in Canada, and in particular in the Toronto outbreak which is the largest outside of Southeast Asia.
"We're trying to look at the experiences we've taken for the last six to seven weeks. Then we can say: Do we need to do things differently? And hopefully then, in terms of the rest of the world and the rest of the country we can demonstrate what works, what doesn't and then see where we need to go on from here."
While the opening session was taken up with slideshows of Health Canada's response to the new disease, it will likely be in the working group discussions - closed to the media - where the meat of the matter is placed on the table.
One of the key figures in the Ontario SARS containment team signalled one area where he'd like to see discussion: on the way SARS cases are reported to the public.
Dr. James Young, Ontario's commissioner of public security, said issuing cumulative case numbers daily probably confused the local - and the global - public about the severity of the Toronto outbreak.
"In retrospect, it is confusing to take a cumulative number, because it doesn't give the advice . . . is the number going up? Is the number going down? What is the steepness of the curve," Young said. "That's really the key to the epidemic. It's not the cumulative number."
"There's also a huge amount of confusion around suspect cases and probable cases and how much attention should we pay to suspect cases versus probable cases," he continued.
"I think this is exactly the kind of thing that has to be learned. . . . That's one of my lessons learned. We spend a lot of time every day talking about the numbers. And I think it isn't as clear as it maybe ought to have been."
While Young's point of contention looked back to the handling of the waning crisis, another member of the Toronto team hoped to have a frank discussion about a measure that is before the federal government now: that of airport screening.
In the aftermath of the imposed and then lifted World Health Organization travel advisory for Toronto, it has seemed clear that a major concern for the Geneva-based body was its sense that Canada was not doing enough to prevent SARS from spreading from this country to others, particularly in the developing world.
The federal government has announced it will introduce pilot projects at Toronto and Vancouver airports to take passengers' temperatures as a means of preventing people who might have a SARS-related fever from leaving the country.
But Dr. Donald Low questioned the merit of the move, suggesting while it might give the impression of action it could also be a waste of resources. He noted that the two SARS cases that Canada exported - and one is still in doubt - would not have been prevented by thermal airport screening.
"One of them didn't fly. He drove to Philadelphia. So he wouldn't have been picked up," noted Low, microbiologist-in-chief at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.
"And the case in Manila, if it's a case - we don't know but let's say that it is - that person didn't become symptomatic until April 6, (but) left the country on April 1. (She) wouldn't have been detected."
"So we're resting all of this on the basis of two people, both of those wouldn't have been detected by what is currently being recommended," he insisted.
"That has to be discussed, not only for what we're going to do, but for people doing (setting policy for) the world."
Not irrational, but probably very difficult to prove. Some of the articles from the gene sequencing teams spoke of seeing 5 open frame sequences. They claim this is an attribute of an old, very mature organism. It's more likely that this was an opportunistic situation. The mutation to nail the H131 receptor occurred in a target rich environment.
BTW, Asian Indians are racially Caucasian as determined by various dimensions of the skull. Seeing a 23% occurrence in both groups isn't a surprising finding. It is very good news if it means that India won't be ravaged by SARS. Conversely, it is bad news for the ethnic Chinese and Japanese populations. I hope there is some leverage we can gain by finding a means of suppressing IGG2 or masking the H131 CD32 receptors.
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