I have to chime in again about China. They are keeping the numbers down by excluding people without a known chain of transmission from a defined SARS victim, and all people with mild symptoms that don't require hospitalization.
>>WHO Questions China's Sharp SARS Falloff
Tue June 3, 2003 06:50 AM ET
GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday questioned a reported sharp fall in new SARS cases in China, the world's worst-hit country, saying it was "concerned" at how the counting was being done.
The United Nations health agency has warned the only way to beat the potentially-fatal respiratory disease, which has no simple treatment, is through rigorous identification of cases and patients' immediate isolation.
It fears that if the disease, which kills 15 percent of its victims, takes root in the vast Chinese countryside, it could become a permanent health threat around the globe where more than 8,300 people have already caught it.
On Tuesday, China announced just three new cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), two of them in Beijing. It has gone nine days in a row with fewer than 10 officially reported fresh infections.
"We are concerned about how these cases are being counted...We do not know enough about where these numbers are coming from," WHO spokesman Iain Simpson told journalists.
"It may simply be that there has been a dramatic drop off in the number of SARS cases, but clearly because of the way that SARS emerged in China, China has a credibility problem," he said.
China, which has over 60 percent of the world's SARS cases, took four months to inform the WHO about the illness, believed to have begun last November in the south of the country.
Simpson said the WHO was particularly concerned about the situation in the capital, adding WHO officials were working with Chinese health authorities to gather more information.
More than 5,300 people have been infected with SARS in China and 334 people have died.<<
asia.reuters.com
My prediction is that this isn't going to work. |
