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medpundit |
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Thursday, April 17, 2003Health-care professionals had been looking for people who had recently returned from Southeast Asia, people who had contact with a SARS patient or people who had been at one of two hospitals where uncontained outbreaks occurred. Later, people who had attended an April 3 wake for a man who died of SARS were added to the list. With word earlier this week that at least 30 members of a Catholic church group had become infected, those trying to contain the spread realized the profile is no longer a tool hospitals can rely on to identify incoming SARS patients. "We've now seen patients, people coming down in a very close-knit (religious) community," said Low. "We know the potential for secondary transmission is quite high. For every person who has the disease in the community, the potential of exposing who knows how many others and many of those will come down with infections." It’s enough of a problem that the Catholic church is suspending some rituals, both ordinary and Easter-types: - The sharing of communion wine. - Shaking hands or hugging during the sign of peace at masses. - Kissing the crucifix, known as the veneration of the cross. - The distribution of communion wafers on parishioners' tongues. Restrictions on the distribution of communion and handshakes will continue for the duration of the SARS outbreak, Fabbro said in his letter. What I want to know is, will they move to those little shot-glasses so common in Protestant churches? A reader wonders if there might not be a lot more SARS cases out there: The question that came up for me reading your information about SARS has to do with numbers of cases. How do we know what the number of cases actually is? I assume that the cases that get diagnosed are the ones that are serious enough for the people to come to the doctor. In other words, we really only know about that serious cases. Unless, someone goes through the population and tests some sample, we really have no clue as to the infection rate, do we? That’s true, we don’t have a good handle on the actual infection rate. There could be a lot of milder cases running around that are never diagnosed. Although, once the disease was recognized as a problem in southeast Asia, travellers returning from there were given cards describing the symptoms and advising them to seek treatment if they developed them, so it might not be as widespread as it could be. On the other hand, now that it’s starting to gain a footing in some communities, it’ll be hard to continue to track that, unless a diagnostic test is developed. That test may be available by Monday in Singapore: Developed by the government-run Genome Institute of Singapore, the test may be sensitive enough to detect the virus in its early stages before a person develops symptoms such as high fever and a dry cough, the pro-government newspaper said. "The test has been able to pick up clearly the virus in the blood," Dr Ren Ee Chee, deputy director of the institute, was quoted by the newspaper as saying. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States is working to license and distribute a quick test for the virus, so doctors can tell which patients have SARS as opposed to some other form of pneumonia. On Monday, a German company, Hamburg-based Artus GmbH, said it was distributing a quick "real-time" test that can detect the virus by looking for its genetic signature. Ren said the Singapore test was in its final stage of completion. UPDATE: Canadian Anglicans are restricting rituals, too. posted by Sydney on 4/17/2003 08:21:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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