The WHO is to announce whether it will lift its SARS travel warning for Beijing, a day after Hong Kong was declared free of the disease.
The WHO is to announce whether it will lift its SARS travel warning for Beijing, a day after Hong Kong was declared free of the disease. [BBC News]
Three months ago, SARS appeared poised to sweep the world, a mysterious new disease racing out of southern China for which there was no vaccine, cure or diagnostic test.Today, SARS is disappearing almost as fast, and almost as unpredictably, as it arrived. This week, the World Health Organization declared it under control, with only a handful of cases worldwide in the last week.
The agency's only remaining advisory against travel — to Beijing — is expected to be lifted in a few days. Hong Kong, the city with more cases and deaths relative to its population than anywhere else, has had no new cases since June 2.
The existing World Health Organization guidelines for diagnosing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may not be adequate.While current WHO guidelines emphasize respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughing, and difficulty breathing, a team of researchers reporting in the June 21 issue of the British Medical Journal feels that emphasis may be misplaced. Symptoms at the early stages of the illness in the patients they studied were more likely to include fever, chills, loss of appetite, vomiting, and diarrhea.
The World Health Organization says the worst is over in the fight against SARS less than three months after a global alert triggered an unprecedented worldwide response.The pneumonia-like disease that spanned China to Canada has killed about 800 people and infected more than 8,000, sending authorities scurrying to contain it through centuries-old measures of isolation, quarantine and travel restrictions.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has strongly advised countries to strengthen their surveillance efforts even though the SARS situation worldwide appears to be improving, as there is still a lack of information on the deadly virus.WHO Medical Officer for Global Alert and Response Dr. Mark Salter said WHO was confident the measures taken by the international community to control the disease were effective, as the organisation had seen a significant decrease in cases around the world.
"But now is not the time to relax with it (SARS) tapering off, but to strengthen and redouble efforts to ensure we detect every case."
Researchers from Alberta's Suffield military base are celebrating a major breakthrough in the struggle to crack the SARS virus -- they have become the first ever to snag fragments of the deadly disease from the air.While the findings don't resolve the question of whether severe acute respiratory syndrome can be spread through airborne infection, experts say they do show the virus can be in the air.
It happens again and again. Strange and frightening new infections seem to appear out of nowhere, such as Lyme disease, Ebola and, of course, AIDS. With monkeypox coming on the heels of SARS, which emerged not long after West Nile, it's a phenomenon that seems to be happening at an accelerating rate....
"There are probably hundreds, if not thousands -- maybe even millions of viruses out there," said Robert G. Webster, a leading virologist at the St. Jude Children?s Research Hospital in Memphis. "We don't even know they're there until we disturb them. SARS is probably just a gentle breeze of what one of these big ones is going to do someday."
Frightening.
-Tim
A cure for SARS is unlikely soon, a World Health Organization official said Saturday at a conference that failed to agree on how to treat the deadly virus.
Emerging infectious diseases such as West Nile virus, SARS and monkeypox are "the new normal," the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, adding that the national public health system must change its approach to medicine to respond to this emerging threat.
A major ingredient in licorice has proven remarkably successful at combatting the SARS virus in lab-dish tests, according to a German study reported on Saturday in the British weekly journal The Lancet.Glycyrrhizin, a compound extracted from licorice roots which has been previously explored in anti-viral research, was highly effective at stopping the SARS virus from reproducing, the authors say.
As Ontario officials try once more to contain the virus -- weeks after they thought it had been eradicated -- the demands on health care workers are mounting. Meanwhile, some health officials say the cost of treating severe acute respiratory syndrome is further burdening Ontario's government-financed health care system, which is already suffering from budget cuts, nursing shortages and extensive patient waiting lists.
World Health Organization officials said on Friday they plan to have an explanation next week for an apparent sudden decrease in SARS cases in China.WHO has been suspicious of China's reported decline, which dropped from thousands in recent months to a just handful in the past week, but has been diplomatic in its questioning of officials in Beijing.
As health officials from Toronto to Taiwan struggle to contain SARS through measures like quarantines and the prohibition of spitting in public places, scientists are piecing together clues about the virus, its genome, and its origins.
As scientists and companies race to develop diagnostic tests to quickly determine whether a person has SARS, they face a big challenge: testing whether the tests themselves are accurate.A number of experimental tests have been developed or are being developed, scientists, government officials and corporate executives said in recent interviews and at a meeting on SARS research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., on Friday
The Sars outbreak has peaked in countries around the world - including China, the worst hit by the pneumonia-like disease, a World Health Organization official has said."It's fair to say that the Sars epidemic is over its peak. We can see it globally and we can also see it in China," WHO representative in China Henk Bekedam told a briefing.
Taiwan reported no new SARS cases on Wednesday and said it hoped to be removed from the World Health Organisation's (WHO) travel advisory list by mid-June. "Our SARS situation is easing. Hopefully, we can be removed from the WHO's travel warning list by the middle of the month," a spokesman for the health department said on Wednesday.
For the first time in more than two months, no new deaths were reported yesterday from SARS, the latest indication that the epidemic is subsiding, the World Health Organization said.The cumulative number of SARS cases worldwide hit 8,402 yesterday, an increase of 10 from the day before. But the number of deaths from severe acute respiratory syndrome was unchanged -- at 772.
New York Times by Donald G. McNeil Jr.
As I write this -- it's Sunday, May 25 -- I am in quarantine because of SARS.I'm at home in Manhattan, it's voluntary, and I'm perfectly healthy. My temperature is 97.2 (low normal for me) while the first symptom of severe acute respiratory syndrome is a rise to 100.4.
I'm doing it only because people are irrationally terrified of the disease, and I don't want my co-workers marching on my cubicle with torches and garlic, or my children's teachers' panicking.
Canadian health officials investigate four possible Sars deaths and express concern at quarantine violations. [BBC News]