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WHO team arrives in China as SARS spreads
Anil K Joseph in Beijing |
April 21, 2003 19:52 IST
With the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome spreading in China and new cases surfacing in more provinces, a team of experts from the World Health Organisation arrived in Shanghai on Monday to suggest measures to combat the disease even as Beijing claimed to have introduced a safe testing method to detect the virus within an hour.
The five-member team will study the situation in Shanghai where two confirmed SARS cases were reported and suggest a course of treatment for the disease that has killed more than 80 people in China and 180 worldwide.
Two more persons died from SARS in China on Sunday and seven fresh
cases were reported from four provinces till now free from the disease.A SARS expert in Jilin, one of the newly affected provinces, said they have three confirmed cases and two suspected cases. Beijing University, meanwhile, placed 118 people under observation for the disease, including 54 who have fever.
In view of the disease spreading to rural areas, China has raised by nearly 50 per cent the budget for combating it.
Vice-minister for Health Zhu Qingsheng said China will continue to strengthen co-operation with the WHO.
The WHO experts are expected to confer with local health authorities, inspect hospitals, colleges and local disease control centres at the municipal and district levels, and examine measures taken to prevent and control SARS.
Zhu said there has been no report of SARS spreading in China's vast rural hinterland, but the disease "is possible to be brought there by returned migrant workers". The farmers in rural China have relatively poorer medical care, income and awareness of self-protection on SARS, and so the spread of the disease may cause 'serious consequences', he warned.
China admitted on Sunday to 346 SARS cases in Bejing and 402
suspected cases, far more than had previously been acknowledged, and sacked the city's mayor Meng Xuenong and cancelled a week-long festival in the capital. But the state-run media also reported that the country has introduced a method based on the sequencing of the virus's genome to test for it within an hour.
The new method uses the specially modified protein of the virus to detect the presence of a type of antibody that the body produces as a response to the infection, experts said.
Responding to criticism about China's slow admission and under-reporting of SARS cases, Gao Qiang, executive vice-minister for health, promised to provide accurate and timely reports as of April 21.
Gao said the government has told hospitals that they are not allowed to reject SARS patients in any circumstances, including for financial reasons. Such rejection will be punished severely, he warned.
"If hospitals involved do have practical difficulties, they can temporarily isolate and treat the suspected patients while waiting for assistance, but they cannot reject the patients, which might lead to further spreading of the epidemic," he said.
PTI