Posted on 05/21/2003 6:55:58 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
BEIJING - The World Health Organisation (WHO) is worried about a possible surge in the Sars epidemic during China's annual summer floods as overloaded sewerage systems back up, a spokesman for the agency said yesterday.
The Sars virus does not appear to be transmitted by water but it can survive for days in faeces, which might be spread by overflowing sewage, said Mr Bob Dietz, a spokesman in Beijing for the UN agency.
Areas throughout southern, central and north-eastern China suffer deadly flooding every year.
Thousands of homes are inundated by waters laced with sewage that also can contaminate drinking-water sources.
'We see this as a potential threat, something to beware of,' he said.
'Sars could rear up again.'
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) has killed 296 people on China's mainland and infected more than 5,200.
This year, 73 deaths already have been reported in flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rains last week in the southern provinces of Hunan, Fujian and Guangdong, where Sars is believed to have originated.
Already strained by Sars, health facilities in China's vast, poor countryside could come under more pressure to deal with injuries and other diseases as a result of the flooding, Mr Dietz said.
But he said little could be done to prevent the situation.
'You can't stop flooding and there's nothing that can be done to improve sewerage systems at such a short order.'
He said the WHO was also considering sending teams to the northern region of Inner Mongolia, the south-western province of Sichuan and the hard-hit northern province of Shanxi, which has reported 445 Sars cases and 20 fatalities.
The change in seasons could also see people dying of Sars in the United States and Europe, warned US Secretary for Health Tommy G. Thompson.
Sars is caused by a coronavirus, a family of viruses that cause about 30 per cent of common colds.
Coronaviruses are typically most infectious in the winter months, with outbreaks declining in the spring and summer and then rebounding in the autumn.
Mr Thompson said on Tuesday at a meeting of European Union officials in Brussels: 'Even though Sars may level off now, it could come back in autumn and then you will have deaths in all the continents, or a lot of the continents.'
Asked how confident he was that the US and Europe could avoid Sars deaths, he said: 'I'm not confident at all. I think you will see them.'
'With the tremendous transit populations we have right now, you've got to assume that somebody from Europe will pick it up in one of the affected countries and bring it back,' he said.
'I don't think Sars is going to go away.'
Couldn't help.
But the floods put things in perspective. They kill way more than Sars has.
No one cares about thousands of dead people from flooding.
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