Canadian bureaucrats argue it's too soon to suggest SARS has spread

London Free Press ^ | June 17, 2003 | HELEN BRANSWELL, CP

[CobaltBlue]

TORONTO -- Test results on a man who died at an Oshawa hospital early this month show evidence he may have been infected with SARS. But officials said yesterday it was too soon to suggest SARS had spread to another hospital in the region because testing of specimens produced conflicting findings.

If it turns out this is a case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, it will raise many questions about how the man contracted the disease. He was known to have been in close proximity to two SARS patients at the hospital, but died too soon after contact for them to have been the source of his infection -- if indeed he was infected, said Dr. Don Atkinson, chief of staff for Lakeridge Health, which runs the Oshawa hospital.

"Neither we nor public health have been able to identify a patient that would have been involved in transmission (to the man)."

If this case turns out to be SARS, it will be a disappointing turn of events in the otherwise good news story of the cluster of suspicious respiratory illness in Whitby and Oshawa.

Last week, a group of patients in a dialysis clinic and residents of two seniors' homes were placed under investigation when word of a cluster of respiratory ailments surfaced. Local SARS experts feared the worst, suggesting Toronto was about to embark on a punishing third round of SARS. But by yesterday, those fears had been all but put to rest.

"Tests of ill residents have determined that the cause of respiratory illness . . . was not SARS," said Dr. Donna Reynolds, associate medical officer of health for Durham Region.

In addition, while one dialysis patient from Whitby and one health-care worker from Oshawa are still under investigation, all the others have been cleared.

That news comes when public health authorities in Toronto are growing confident the city's second SARS outbreak is tailing off.

There have been no new probable cases reported since June 8 when two were reported, household contacts of health-care workers exposed at North York General Hospital, the epicentre of SARS 2. A suspect case of the disease -- again a household contact of a health-care worker -- was reported on June 11.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

- Health officials suspect a Bulgarian man who lives permanently in Toronto could be infected with SARS, Bulgaria's state news agency BTA said. The 40- year-old man was taken yesterday to the infectious diseases department of a hospital in the Black Sea city of Burgas, his doctor, Kosta Bakardzhiev, told the news agency. The patient, who wasn't identified, lives in Toronto. He arrived in Bulgaria in early June after a visit to Pakistan.

- Almost 40 people on the fringes of North Carolina's SARS scare remained quarantined as a precaution yesterday, although health officials said the danger of the disease is steadily dropping. One man who was confirmed to have contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome while on a visit to Toronto was released from isolation over the weekend. A man who worked in the same building as the SARS victim died on Friday.

[First Amendment]

me too!

[Truth29]

I'm late to this thread, but are there any Toronto Freepers who can comment on the possibility that SARS has spread into the general population and/or Health Canada is trying to define the problem down and thereby not take the steps necessry to protect the general population?