SARS is now a world wide health threat. We may hear about it on the battle field in Iraq.]
SARS flu spread by sustained close contact, says WHO
Peter Cordingly, Public Information Officer of the World Health Organization's regional office in Manila, told radio dzMM Monday morning that the so-called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia whose cause is not yet known, is not easily spread by casual contact.
"You'd have to be in close sustained contact with a person suffering from it to possibly get, too," Cordingly said. "So there's no need for unnecessary alarm. You can't get it casually on the MRT, for instance."
Cordingly explained that this is one reason why many of those who have contracted the illness are medical professionals, doctors and nurses who are in constant close proximity to patients.
He said it would be wise to be careful about being in contact with anyone who has been to one of the so-called problem areas in the past three weeks.
An American businessman died in Hong Kong Thursday last week after being flown from Hanoi with respiratory problems. France and Japan have sent medical experts to Hanoi, where 46 hospital staff are ill and one nurse died of the virus on Saturday.
The illness, which starts with flu-like symptoms such as coughing, high fever and shortness of breath, can deteriorate rapidly into pneumonia.
Dozens of people in Hong Kong and Vietnam, many of them hospital staff, are also infected and numbers have been rising steadily in Singapore and Taiwan.
U.S. health officials said on Saturday they were investigating reports that two people passing through Atlanta and New York had the illness. They gave no other details.
Six more infections were reported in Hong Kong and Singapore on Sunday. WHO said it had also received reports of cases in Indonesia and Thailand, but it gave no details.
In southern China, 305 people contracted severe pneumonia in February and five died. WHO and other experts are studying if there are links between these cases and others elsewhere.
"This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide health threat," WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a statement.
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