Posted on 03/30/2003 6:28:17 PM PST by Lessismore
WASHINGTON: US health officials have expanded a travel warning advisory to all of China and Singapore after a mysterious airborne disease spreading across the world claimed the life of the researcher who detected it.
Carlo Urbani, a Hanoi-based Italian epidemiologist with the World Health Organisation who first identified the dangerous new microbe that is going round the globe causing a new kind of pneumonia, died in a Bangkok hospital on Saturday of the same disease.
The pneumonia, now known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is poised to trigger a worldwide health emergency following reports of airborne transmission that has brought disease into the United States and Canada. There have been more than 1500 reported cases so far in 13 countries and 54 people are reported to have died.
India is so far not counted as a danger spot, but the focus on China, and the US decision to expand its travel warning from Guangdong province in Southern China to the whole country besides adding Singapore to the list (Hong Kong and Vietnam were in the first list), calls for New Delhi to take urgent steps to stop the infection from entering the country.
US and Canadian authorities have said they will now detain and screen people coming from the China and South East Asian countries who show any sign of sickness or symptoms of the disease.
The US-based Center of Disease Control said its officials are meeting planes, cargo ships and cruise ships coming either directly or indirectly to the United States from China, Singapore and Vietnam and distributing health alert cards to disembarking passengers.
Among several other advisories on its website (www.cdc.gov), the center also “advises that people planning elective or non-essential travel to mainland China and Hong Kong; Singapore; and Hanoi, Vietnam may wish to postpone their trips until further notice.”
The war on Iraq has obviously eclipsed the story but there have been a few images of travelers in and from China waiting in airports with masks covering their mouth and nose. China itself has played down reports of the infection, but the US travel warning could severely impact both tourism and the economy if the disease is not contained or does not go away.
The epidemic was first detected by Urbani when he was called to look up a Chinese-American businessman Johnny Cheng, who was infecting doctors and nurses attending on him in a Hanoi hospital. Cheng had traveled in Guangdong in Southern China, from where there had been reports of such a pneumonia infection since February.
Sars symptoms are a lot like those of the flu’ – very high fever, shortness of breath and a dry cough. The disease is spread by close contact and antibiotics do not seem to work. The incubation period for the virus is said to be two to seven days. Some 80 to 90 per cent of infected people recover on their own, but there has been a 4 per cent casualty rate so far.
Comment: The public urgently needs to know what the Indian health authorities are doing — if anything at all — to ensure that this disease does not strike and spread in this country.
I don't think it matters. Ontario has declared a state of emergency.
The Ontario government has declared a state of emergency (Canadian Medical Association Journal)
Let's see...what is there about 270 million people in the United States? If everyone gets it's that would be nearly 11 million dead?
If only half (135 million) get it, that means over 5 million dead?
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