X-Message-Number: 21503 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: NYTimes: Hong Kong Reports Surge of Cases of Disease Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 21:51:29 -0800 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/international/asia/30INFE.html?ex=1049605200&en=803204ae7c7d94f3&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE Hong Kong Reports Surge of Cases of Disease By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG, March 29 Hong Kong health officials said tonight that 78 people had fallen sick with a mysterious respiratory illness in a single apartment complex over the last three days, and warned that the disease might be more easily transmitted than previously believed. The new warning came as the World Health Organization announced in Geneva that the doctor who first identified the fast-spreading disease has himself died of it. The doctor, Carlo Urbani, 46, identified the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, in an American businessman admitted to hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, where Mr. Urbani was based. In the new outbreaks in Hong Kong, a single person from the apartment block became ill a week ago after visiting a hospitalized brother who was being treated for SARS. Since then, dozens of other people from the same apartment complex had fallen ill with the disease, and health officials raised the possibility tonight that for so many people to be infected, the virus might be capable of staying suspended in the air in fairly small droplets, or might have changed in some way. They had previously suggested that fairly large droplets emitted when someone sneezed or coughed had spread the disease. "With such a major concentration in one place, we're extremely concerned," Dr. Thomas Tsang, the Health Department's medical consultant, said at a briefing tonight. "Anything is possible and we're not ruling anything out." But World Health Organization officials were skeptical that the virus had mutated or that it was spreading by any means other than close personal contact with an infected individual. Epidemiologists have been able to trace how a high proportion of all carriers of the disease became infected, and the infections have consistently come from close contact, said Dick Thompson, a spokesman at W.H.O.'s headquarters in Geneva. A medical investigator in Hong Kong said that while there had been large outbreaks in hospitals when health care workers were performing medical procedures that involved close contact with patients, it was a mystery how one person could infect so many in the community. "Is he a very social guy or is there something else going on?" the investigator asked, adding that close contact with many people still appeared the most likely answer. Another investigator said that labs had not yet compared virus samples from the apartment complex patients with samples from other SARS patients. Hong Kong hospitals have been flooded with new SARS patients over the last three days even as other countries have been reporting few new cases. Hong Kong, which has followed less stringent quarantine procedures than many countries, had 51 new cases on Thursday, 58 on Friday and 45 today, raising the total here to 470. According to W.H.O. statistics, Canada had eight new cases today, Singapore had three new cases and Switzerland had one. American doctors were investigating whether eight more people in the United States may have the disease. The numbers here were so large partly because 22 people fell ill on Thursday at the Amoy Garden apartment complex on Thursday, 34 on Friday and 22 more today. The Hong Kong Health Department has set up a post at the complex to interview residents and monitor their health, but some residents have fled to stay elsewhere with friends and relatives, raising the fear that they may spread the disease. An 83-year-old Hong Kong man with a history of heart trouble died of the disease this morning, bringing the death toll here to 12, all of them either elderly or with other medical complications. Hong Kong hospitals discharged 18 recovered patients today, after discharging only 25 over the previous three weeks. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21503