Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Health

HEALTH: WHO Expresses Concern over New Form of Pneumonia

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Mar 25 2003 (IPS) - World Health Organisation (WHO) authorities expressed concern Tuesday over the continued spread of what has been dubbed ”Asian pneumonia”, an apparently new disease whose cause has not yet been determined, in Hong Kong and China.

Health authorities are worried because the disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), has been spreading in several hospitals in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, said David Heymann, WHO executive director of communicable diseases.

The chief symptoms of SARS are high fever and respiratory problems, including cough, shortness of breath, and difficulty breathing.

WHO has received reports of 487 verified cases in 12 countries, including 17 deaths.

A total of 286 cases and 10 deaths caused by the disease, which has apparently originated in Asia, had been verified in Hong Kong as of Tuesday.

The United Nations agency’s concern with respect to the rest of China is largely due to a dearth of information from that country, which has generated uncertainty regarding the efficacy of measures aimed at curbing the spread of the disease, Heymann told a news briefing in Geneva Tuesday.

The information available on SARS includes possible cases of contagion in airplanes. However, WHO continues to recommend no travel restrictions to any destination.

Before reaching that decision, WHO authorities met with representatives of industrialised countries and Asian countries that have documented cases.

The war on Iraq and the uncertainty as to just how SARS spreads have hurt the tourism industry and airlines in particular, which were already hit hard by a fall in activity in the wake of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington involving hijacked airliners, and by the slowdown of the global economy.

Heymann said WHO is working with the affected countries to gain a better understanding of the disease.

Singapore has put 740 people who may have come into contact with SARS in quarantine.

The agency first issued an alert on the spread of the disease on Mar. 15, and recommended that airplane passengers and crews pay close attention to the possible appearance of symptoms.

That recommendation was reiterated Tuesday with no suggestion of restrictions on flights, even though WHO had just received a report from the Hong Kong health department containing preliminary information on nine new cases of the disease among participants in a Beijing tour organised in Hong Kong.

Health authorities in Hong Kong are tracing the members of the crew and passengers from two flights linked to that tour.

Heymann said the medical community is anxious to determine how people are infected with SARS, because cases have been registered in schools in Hong Kong, and so far it has been impossible to ascertain whether the disease is only spread by actual physical contact or whether it could be airborne.

Researchers are attempting to verify if contagion occurred in the planes, either due to physical proximity – by sitting next to an infected person – or through the ventilation system.

Heymann said there was no evidence so far that the disease was airborne. But he added that WHO teams sent to Hong Kong, Vietnam and China were working on coming up with a definitive answer to that question.

Two different viruses have been found among a number of the SARS patients, leading to speculation that the two somehow act together to cause the disease, said WHO researcher Dr. Klaus Stohr. But in other patients, he added, only one of the viruses was present.

Researching the origin of the disease is a complex task, and a network of 11 laboratories in nine countries has been set up to undertake the task, said Dr. Julie Hall, a WHO medical officer.

The illness has an incubation period of two to seven days. Cases have been reported among relatives of patients and among people who have come into contact with health workers, and in one case the contagion was found to have occurred in a Hong Kong hotel.

The disease’s mortality rate of four percent is considered low by experts, similar to the rate of influenza, said Hall, who also reported that the rate had remained stable over the past 10 days.

However, the low mortality rate is partly due to ”enormous clinical efforts taken with those patients,” Stohr underlined.

Heymann also observed that the disease is of unknown origin and is spreading around the world, with cases reported not only in Asia, but in Canada, the United States and European nations as well.

Of 150 patients with SARS being treated in one Hong Kong hospital alone, 30 are in intensive care. ”Quite a few of them are on ventilators, and would die without mechanical respiration,” Stohr pointed out.

Some hospitals attending SARS patients are ”burdened almost to the limit,” he added, recommending that the enormous burden on the public health system be taken into account in measuring the impact of the disease.