Asian Acute Respiratory Disease Spreads Worldwide!

[adikgede]

 

HK doctors 'identify killer disease'

 

...

John Oxford, professor of Virology at Queen Mary's School of Medicine, said a similar virus had been discovered in Holland last year.

 

 

"It is rather slow-moving, rather restricted to families and hospitals, not a rip-roaring affair, but still very nasty.

 

"There are no anti-viral drugs against this family of viruses, and there are no vaccines available. It will be a question of several years work.

 

"But it is not fantastically infectious, so I wouldn't expect there to be a massive outbreak in other parts of the world."

 

 

...

 

BBC Story

[Guest]

HK doctors 'identify killer disease'

 

...

John Oxford, professor of Virology at Queen Mary's School of Medicine, said a similar virus had been discovered in Holland last year.

 

 

"It is rather slow-moving, rather restricted to families and hospitals, not a rip-roaring affair, but still very nasty.

 

"There are no anti-viral drugs against this family of viruses, and there are no vaccines available. It will be a question of several years work.

 

"But it is not fantastically infectious, so I wouldn't expect there to be a massive outbreak in other parts of the world."

 

 

...

 

BBC Story

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[color:"red"]Maybe not so cut and dried yet ! [/color]

 

Illness may spread more easily than expected

 

 

By CAROLYN ABRAHAM

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

 

A Toronto man battling the mysterious pneumonia slowly spreading around the globe contracted the disease after spending 12 hours in the same hospital room as an infected patient ? on the other side of a curtain and in a bed two metres away.

 

The man, in his 70s, is connected to a respirator, fighting fluid in both lungs, and his case is prompting public-health officials to reconsider the transmission of this unknown pathogen.

 

The infectious agent behind the atypical pneumonia named SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome, remains elusive, but scientists in Germany and Hong Kong reported Tuesday that they had isolated traces of a known and suspicious virus from two patients.

 

They cautioned that the tests are preliminary, and World Health Organization officials stressed that other labs ? including those in Canada ? had not confirmed the lead and that much remains unknown about the agent that has killed at least nine people and possibly infected more than 200 worldwide.

 

Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said the latest Toronto case, for example, suggests that "face-to-face" or close contact may not be necessary for the microbe to spread.

 

"These were both sick patients, separated by a curtain; they weren't up and around talking to each other," said Dr. Low, who visited the room Tuesday and was rushing to submit the case report to Health Canada officials and the international network of health specialists that has sprung up to deal with the outbreak.

 

The Toronto case indicates that the infectious agent is hearty enough to travel in respiratory droplets a few metres before landing, Dr. Low said. It may spur officials to reassess the risk of contracting the infection on airplanes, he added.

 

WHO and Health Canada have not advised travel restrictions. U.S. officials, however, have recommended postponing non-essential trips to Southeast Asia, where the pneumonic outbreak is prevalent.

 

Most of Canada's 11 suspected or confirmed cases ? nine in Toronto, one in Vancouver and one in Edmonton ? were found in people returning from the Far East.

 

The first death, for example, involved a woman who returned from Hong Kong and who died at home on March 5. The woman's son contracted the illness from his mother and had shared a room at Scarborough Grace Hospital for one night with the elderly man later diagnosed with SARS.

 

Dr. Low said the man was admitted to the hospital on March 7 and assigned to the room before doctors knew about the link to Asia's cases of atypical pneumonia. The elderly man returned to the hospital on March 11 with the hallmark symptoms of high fever and coughing.

 

Health Canada spokesman Emmanuel Chabot said the federal government is drafting national guidelines to help limit the spread of the illness.

 

Patients in Canada and elsewhere are showing signs of recovering. But doctors cannot say whether this is the natural course of the disease or the effects of the antibiotics and antivirals being used to treat it.

 

For this reason, WHO officials said they hope the preliminary findings of researchers in Hong Kong and in Germany will not prompt doctors to alter their courses of treatment.

 

A report from Hong Kong said researchers there had identified SARS as a virus from the paramyxoviridae family.

 

"It is an important finding showing the antiviral treatment is the right choice," Sydney Chung Sheung-chee, dean of the Chinese University's faculty of medicine, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post Wednesday.

 

But doctors said the paramyxoviridae family incorporates different viruses that could affect humans and more studies were needed.

 

Specialists at Frankfurt University have also reported that they have detected particles resembling paramyxoviruses in the sputum and throat swabs of two patients.

 

Paramyxoviruses are in a large group of microbes that can infect humans and animals, including dogs, pigeons and bats. Some paramyxoviruses are more common than others, such as those that cause respiratory infections, mumps, measles, flu-like symptoms and croup in children. One type was been behind a meningitis outbreak in Malaysia in 1999, known as the Nipah virus.

 

The German scientists said that electron-microscope tests found the virus in specimens from a doctor from Singapore and his mother-in-law. The two had been en route to New York when they fell ill during the flight and were put in hospital in Frankfurt on March 15.

 

Frank Plummer, scientific director of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said electron-microscope tests on Canadian specimens, and those done in other countries, show no traces of paramyxoviruses, which resemble round particles covered in spikes.

 

But, Dr. Plummer said, the Winnipeg lab is doing genetic tests for this viral group. "It could be the real deal or it could be an artifact [from a previous infection]. ... It's just too early to say."

 

Similarly, Wolfgang Preiser, a virologist at Frankfurt University Hospital, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday that: "These preliminary findings only indicate a suspicion. ... Furthermore, even if the presence of a paramyxovirus was confirmed, it is not clear at this stage whether this might represent the causal agent of SARS or rather a coincidental finding."

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

[color:"red"]More news and a hotel I hope you haven't stayed at recently. Looks like we all may be able to relax any paranoia for now. Sure hope so. Good info always welps calm the minds of the sane ! [/color]

 

Geneva ? Doctors focused their search for the cause of a mysterious flu-like illness Wednesday on a family of common respiratory viruses and raised the possibility that some early victims caught the disease in a Hong Kong hotel.

 

Investigators said Wednesday that seven of the victims, including one who died, had all stayed on or visited the same floor of the Metropole Hotel before the outbreak prompted a global alert. The discovery may be significant, because until now officials have said close personal contact is necessary to catch the illness.

 

Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the Hong Kong Health Department, said all had been on the ninth floor between Feb. 12 and March 2. They were three from Singapore, two Canadians, a man from mainland Cnina who later died, and a Hong Kong resident whose illness spread to dozens of workers at Hong Kong's Prince of Wales Hospital.

 

No hotel workers have become ill, and Dr. Chan did not say whether there was any other connection among the guests who got sick.

 

"The hygiene condition in the hotel is fine," she said. "We believe that the virus has already disappeared."

 

The World Health Organization has listed 10 deaths from severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The latest victim was a French doctor in Vietnam. The total does not include three deaths in Hong Kong that officials said Wednesday appear linked to the outbreak there. It was unclear whether those victims were connected to the hotel.

 

Specialists at Frankfurt University in Germany said samples from two people there resemble a paramyxovirus, the family of viruses including such ubiquitous bugs as the respiratory syncytial virus and the parainfluenza viruses, as well as viruses that cause such common childhood illnesses as mumps and measles.

 

Doctors in Hong Kong also said they found similar signs of paramyxovirus in victims there.

 

"We've identified the virus," Dr. John Tam, a microbiologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said late Tuesday. "We used electronic microscope and found the virus in patient samples."

 

Some experts caution, however, that it still is too soon to be sure this is the culprit. Members of this family of microbes are extremely common, and they could be present by chance without causing the mysterious disease. Nevertheless, the finding is the first potential clue to emerge in the three weeks since the illness came to the attention of health experts.

 

The incubation period for SARS appears to be three to seven days. It often begins with a fever above 100 degrees and other flu-like symptoms, such as headache and sore throat. Victims typically develop coughs, pneumonia, shortness of breath and other breathing difficulties. Death results from respiratory failure.