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Tuesday, March 18, 2003Today the Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, said a suspected case had come into the UK. "We are watching this outbreak extremely closely," he told the BBC. "But the latest development is this morning a patient has been admitted to hospital who came in on a plane yesterday from Hong Kong. "At the moment we are not sure whether the case is linked but we are treating it as a possible link to the outbreak in the Far East." Several in the United States: Doctors in the USA have notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of several patients who may have a mysterious pneumonia-like illness that has killed seven in Asia and two in Canada, an agency official said Sunday. One in Israel: A 33-year-old man was hospitalized yesterday in Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital with flu-like symptoms, after returning home from Hong Kong. The man had complained of fever, cough, headache and pains in his muscles. The Health Ministry spokesman said yesterday that the cause of the condition had not yet been established in lab tests and that the man had not developed pneumonia. The decision to hospitalize the patient had come as a precautionary measure as the man had returned from Hong Kong, the spokesman said. And two in Australia: Two Victorians are being treated as suspected cases of the pneumonia-like illness which has been linked to nine deaths around the world. Department of Human Services spokesman Bram Alexander today said a 47-year-old woman was being treated at Ballarat Base Hospital, while a 44-year-old man was in a stable condition at Royal Melbourne Hospital. ..Both Victorian patients had recently returned from overseas and had been in Asian countries, during the 10 day danger period, Mr Alexander said. According to the New Scientist a dozen countries have isolated people with the symptoms: Unconfirmed cases have now emerged in the UK, Australia, Switzerland and Slovenia, all connected with travel to the Far East. Health authorities on all continents are taking the risk of importing the disease extremely seriously. The US, South Africa and Russia, amongst others, have put their health authorities on nationwide alert. In fact, it isn’t even certain that those are all cases of the same illness. It’s tempting to read all of this and think that we’re in the midst of some horrible epidemic, but what we’re in the midst of is an attempt to prevent a horrible epidemic. Not enough is known about the illness to predict how it would behave if it spread around the globe. One thing we do know is that it’s highly contagious, and sometimes fatal: The illness, which originated in Guangdong province, sickened about 300 people in China, with five dying. In the subsequent wave in other countries, about 200 people have become ill, including 43 new cases reported Saturday in Vietnam. There have been fewer than 10 deaths in the second wave, although many people are still critically ill. Five out of three hundred isn’t a terribly high mortality rate, but it’s still higher than we’re used to for most of our easily caught infectious diseases. What really has public health authorities worried is the possibility that this could be the beginning of a major influenza epidemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1918. That’s why they’re taking so many precautions to prevent its spread and to try to identify the cause. So far, nothing has been isolated, but some things have been ruled out, including the previously reported Influenza B: ..However, WHO officials said yesterday that tests for influenza A -- the more virulent of the two forms of the influenza virus -- have all been negative. The Chinese Health Ministry reported the Guangdong patients showed no evidence of the "bird flu" strain of influenza A that killed a few people and many chickens in 1997. A few patients hospitalized in Hong Kong in the recent wave of cases have antibodies in their blood suggesting recent infection with influenza B, the milder form of the virus. Such a finding is common in winter, however, and the investigators doubt it is the explanation. There is a long list of other candidates, with a family of microbes called the paramyxoviruses "certainly ranking on the top of most people's thoughts," said Klaus Stohr, a WHO virologist and epidemiologist who is helping to direct the investigation. It's just going to take a little more time. And until they know what's causing it, there's no way to tell if everyone who's being observed right now actually has the new pneumonia or just a bad case of some older, well-known bug. posted by Sydney on 3/18/2003 08:18:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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