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Freepers:
Suggest you go to the promedmail.org site for timely updates... but according to posted information "incubation runs from two to five days. Symptoms can include: fever and malaise, sore throat, headache, rash and muscle pain. Several patients have also had gastrointestinal upset and diarrhea.

Respiratory symptoms were common to ALL cases (although these symptoms occured later in the illness in some). Death results from respiratory failure

Health officials say it may be several more days before they are able to identify the disease:

"Certainly influenza is on the minds of many people," said Dr. David Heymann, communicable diseases chief for the World Health Organization. Lab tests have ruled out some varieties of flu as well as some viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever. However, many other possibilities remain, Heymann said.

Those include "a new strain of influenza" or such exotic diseases as the closely related Hendra and Nipah viruses both newly recognized, causing flu-like symptoms and capable of being spread from animals to people. Investigators suspect a virus is involved, because victims do not seem to respond well to standard antibiotics, which kill only bacteria, and because their white blood counts drop. That typically happens with viral infections but not bacterial ones.

PLEASE NOTE: Experts discounted the possibility that terrorism is the source (personally, I don't....yet....) and believe it almost certainly is a contagious infection that spreads most easily from victims to their doctors, nurses and families through coughing, sneezing and other contact with nasal fluids. "Nothing about that pattern suggests bioterrorism," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Officials said they are encouraged that some recent victims seem to be recovering, although they are unsure whether that is because of the many antibiotic and antiviral drugs they have been given or simply the natural course of the disease.

Tests so far have also ruled out the H5N1 bird flu, which has popped up occasionally in China which many fear could be catastrophic if it spread widely among humans.

No cases have been confirmed in the United States, but Gerberding said the CDC is checking out a few calls. The North American fatalities were a woman
and her son who died in Toronto after visiting Hong Kong.

Patients deteriorate quickly after initially coming down with simple flu-like symptoms, doctors say."

(Still, the symptoms sure sound similar to the anthrax attacks we had after 9/11 don't they?....with the exception that this is obviously contagious).