China on SARS Alert After Virus Spreads from Lab :: Namibia Internet Gateway cc ::

Articles: China on SARS Alert After Virus Spreads from Lab

Posted by admin on Friday, April 23, 2004 - 06:33 AM

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese woman suspected to have SARS has died and two other people are confirmed to have contracted the virus in a chain of infection spread from a national research laboratory, the government said on Friday.
was the first reported death from SARS since a deadly outbreak last year claimed hundreds of lives worldwide. China, the country worst hit by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, set up emergency controls as it confirmed two other people were confirmed to have contracted the disease. Hong Kong, which was also badly hit last year, raised its alert level. The local government said in a statement it had sent extra staff to the airport and the city's railway station that receives through-trains from China to spot ill people. China's health ministry said a woman died, apparently of SARS, on April 19 after taking care of her daughter, a 26-year-old medical student who studied for two weeks in a disease control laboratory in Beijing before returning home ill to the eastern province of Anhui. The daughter is one of the two patients confirmed to have contracted by the disease. The other confirmed patient, a 20-year-old nurse at a Beijing hospital, surnamed Li, had treated the medical student, surnamed Song, it said in a statement on its Web site. The ministry quoted experts as saying the source of infection might have been the lab, adding it had been sealed. "The investigation shows...the patient surnamed Li in Beijing has epidemiological links with the confirmed SARS case patient surnamed Song in Anhui," it added. A 31-year-old male post-doctoral student who worked alongside Song in the lab was also suspected of having the disease. The cases in Beijing were the first recorded in China's capital since it was ravaged by the outbreak last year. CONFIDENT China's State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine issued a circular ordering the quarantine of anyone found with a fever at its borders. China had learned from last year's epidemic and would keep the public alerted, Vice Minister of Health Zhu Qinsheng said after attending a meeting of health ministers from Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea and China in the northern Malaysian state of Penang. "We learned from the experience of last year's SARS outbreak and this time we will do our best and immediately alert the public. We are confident that the situation will be under control," he was quoted as saying. "We are prepared. We are confident that SARS will not spread like it did in the past," he told reporters. Li, a nurse from Beijing's Jiangong Hospital, was in an isolation ward in Beijing's Ditan Hospital, the health ministry said. Authorities have placed 188 people who had close contact with Li under medical observation, five of who have shown symptoms of SARS and been isolated at Ditan, it said. The Beijing government said the hospital was well prepared to deal with the case and three wards had been cleared and disinfected for other possible SARS patients. Song was in stable condition at a university hospital in the Anhui provincial capital of Hefei and another 117 people in Anhui were under medical observation, it said. Three of them had been isolated with fever symptoms, the official Xinhua news agency said. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is a type of atypical pneumonia that first emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong late in 2002, spread to Hong Kong, Beijing and on to more than 30 countries, infecting about 8,000 people and killing nearly 800. China confirmed four more cases of SARS in Guangdong early this year, the first since the global outbreak was declared over in July. All four have since recovered.

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