Posted on 03/16/2003 7:54:32 AM PST by ex-Texan
Breaking News: World Alert on Mystery Disease (Broke 1 Hour Ago in Australia)
THE World Health Organisation has issued a rare emergency travel warning that a mysterious form of pneumonia poses a worldwide health threat.
The disease, known as atypical pneumonia, which has killed four people and hospitalised scores of others, is spreading from Asia around the world. Most outbreaks of the highly contagious illness have been reported this past week in Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam.
In the latest fatality, a Vietnamese nurse died at the weekend after having earlier treated an American businessman who also died of the disease.
Canadian health officials reported that two people who recently arrived from Hong Kong died in Toronto.
In Frankfurt, Germany, a doctor who treated a patient with the illness in Singapore had to be taken off a New York-Singapore flight yesterday during a stopover and was hospitalised. Two other people accompanying the doctor were also taken off the flight with symptoms and 150 passengers temporarily quarantined.
"Until we can get a grip on it, I don't see how it will slow down," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson. "People are not responding to antibiotics or antivirals.
"It's a highly contagious disease and it's moving around by jet. It's bad."
The Geneva-based WHO said that in the past week it had received more than 150 reports worldwide of the atypical pneumonia, which it called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
"SARS is now a worldwide health threat," Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, said in Geneva.
"The world needs to work together to find its cause, cure the sick, and stop its spread."
The advisory said there was no reason to restrict travel but urged people to seek medical attention if they had travelled to infected areas and have symptoms of the illness, which include coughing, high fever and shortness of breath.
SARS also may be associated with headache, muscular stiffness, loss of appetite, confusion, rash and diarrhoea.
Epidemiologists from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Vietnam yesterday to investigate the outbreak there. A separate team of French doctors was expected to bring medicine and respirators.
Samples were rushed from Hanoi to Atlanta and will be tested immediately to try to determine the cause, said Dave Daigle, a CDC spokesman.
The Hanoi outbreak started after an American businessman travelling from Shanghai via Hong Kong apparently infected up to 31 hospital workers, four of whom were listed in critical condition, including a French doctor.
The American was evacuated and died in Hong Kong.
Can you provide a citation for this number? Even the Spanih Flu only had a mortality rate of 2.5% I think the mortality rate from your average flue is something like .01%
The doc was quaranteened in Germany had caught it in Singapore, CAME BACK to the US, to New York, and then was on his way back to Singapore when he was hospitalized in Germany. It's certainly possible that, while in NY, he might have passed it on to somebody. The disturbing thought is the most likely people he might have passed it on to would be other medical personnel or hospital workers
If you have to ask, you're toast.
In other words: "Hospitalized patients given the very best care known to modern medicine are dying."
On second thoughts, wonder if this is any relations to Osama, or Saddam?
”The Decameron” by Italian humanist Giovanni Boccaccio, 40, is a love story full of vivid description of the Black Death that has killed three out of every five Florentines. Boccaccio’s 10 protagonists have fled the city to the seclusion of a villa garden on the slopes of Fiesole.
We should be staking out our own secluded place for when the time comes for us to escape into seclusion/isolationism.
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