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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (699)	9/9/2003 4:49:18 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

rfa.org Singapore has confirmed that it has indeed found a new case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the first since the city-state was declared free of the virus on May 31, although the World Health Organization is still unconvinced, RFA reports. The WHO said the 27-year-old Singaporean man, who was studying for a PhD, had not displayed all symptoms listed in its case definition of SARS. But the Singapore authorities said two separate tests confirmed he had the SARS virus. His case could be the first new case of the disease since outbreak was declared over by the WHO in July. But the WHO said the disease did not fit the definition of the disease under its new guidelines and did not represent a public health emergency. Singapore will send the samples of the man's tissue to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for further tests. "From the public health perspective, this does not seem to be an emergency," Dick Thompson of the U.N. agency's communicable diseases division said. "We have rigid case definitions for SARS, and this person does not qualify." The disease spread early this year to 30 countries, mostly by air travelers. It infected nearly 8,500 people globally. In Singapore, where the government imposed strict health controls, there were 33 deaths attributed to SARS. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the global outbreak contained on July 5. The news from Singapore came soon after WHO officials called for greater vigilance, warning of a possible resurgence of the disease. "We have to prepare on the assumption that this will come back. Our challenge now is to enhance surveillance networks that will detect and deal with SARS if it does come back," WHO Director-General Lee Jong-wook told a WHO regional panel in Manila. Meanwhile, health officials in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, and in Hong Kong and Macau, were planning an exercise to test the effectiveness of their cross-boundary notification mechanisms, together with procedures for infectious disease control and prevention. Hong Kong Health Secretary E.K. Yeoh held talks with his Guangdong provincial government counterpart Yao Zhibin, in which both sides agreed to continue reporting their SARS cases on a weekly basis. "With increasingly frequent travel between Guangdong and Hong Kong, we must join hands in the prevention and control of infectious diseases because diseases know no physical boundary," Yeoh told the meeting. Both sides agreed to maintain the frequency of reporting SARS cases on a weekly basis. For other infectious diseases, the frequency will be once a month, and on the 15th day of each month, with point-to-point communication via mail, email, or fax. "The virus is still out there," said Peter Cordingley, WHO's head of public information in the Western Pacific region. "We think it's quite likely lurking in the wild animal population in southern China. There's absolutely no guarantee that it won't jump the species barrier again and come back." He said the WHO did not expect a SARS vaccine to be developed soon because the scientific work on where the virus came from and how it spread to humans was not yet complete. Researchers in Singapore said last week they had developed a test kit capable of detecting the virus in 15 minutes. The WHO criticised Beijing's decision last month to lift a ban imposed in May on the sale of 54 species.