WHO urges pneumonia screening

The World Health Organisation (WHO) urged yesterday the screening of travellers from areas worst hit by a killer pneumonia as Hong Kong scientists said they had identified the mystery virus.

The United Nations agency stepped up a world travel alert already in force in a bid to stop the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which has killed more than 50 people and infected over 1,400, mainly in southeast Asia.

The screening should apply to the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Taiwan, Singapore and Toronto, Canada, where all the deaths have occurred, WHO said.

"We are going to focus on reducing the likelihood of people who are infected with SARS undertaking international travel from the areas that are infected," said Max Hardiman, WHO project leader for international health regulations.

"We are... recommending that people departing from these areas are screened for symptoms or signs of SARS," he told a news conference in Geneva.

Travellers would be asked three questions: whether they had had contact with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); whether they had any of the symptoms; or whether any family member had had contact with the disease.

If they answered yes, they should not be allowed to travel. The disease, which WHO says is new, is thought to have started in southern China last November and spread to Singapore, Vietnam, Canada, Germany, Japan, the United States, France and Britain.

It begins with a high fever and a dry cough, but severe breathing problems quickly follow with the worst affected needing respirators to stay alive.

Amidst rising public panic, the governments of Singapore and Hong Kong have closed schools and Hong Kong has also invoked a quarantine law not used for decades, with anyone breaking it risking a fine or jail for up to six months.

"Forget about Scud missiles and smart bombs, we could all die if someone with the disease merely coughs," said Shirley Li, a Hong Kong mother who sent her son to school in a surgical mask yesterday.

A group of microbiologists from the University of Hong Kong said a new strain from the family of coronaviruses, which are the second leading cause of colds in humans, was to blame.

"We believe that the coronavirus is the main causative agent," said Klaus Stohr, coordinator of the WHO collaborative network of SARS research laboratories.

The finding, confirmed by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, should let doctors diagnose the disease much faster, which would be a major breakthrough in containing its spread, Stohr said.

A vaccine should follow, but Stohr could not say when. Despite the call for screening, WHO officials said that they were still confident that actions being taken by health authorities around the world would bring the disease under control.

Pointing to the example of Vietnam, David Heymann, WHO head of communicable diseases, said that in countries "where they have applied stringent measures and encouraged participation of the international community, the outbreaks have been stopped."

Cases in Vietnam, where four people have died, have been steady at just under 60 for some time.

The official reiterated that WHO was not calling for travel to be restricted either to or from the most affected areas, although WHO member countries were free to take such steps if they felt it necessary for health insurance or other reasons.

Critics and some medical experts in Hong Kong have slammed the government's moves as coming too late, saying the virus had already been spreading in the community, making it virtually impossible to find everyone who might have been exposed.

Eleven people have died in Hong Kong from SARS and 370 are infected.

Deutsche Bank economists said the outbreak could cut Hong Kong's gross domestic product growth by 0.4 percentage points this year, and cut retail sales and hotel revenues by two percent and five percent respectively.

Southern China, crowded with humans and livestock and historically the source of many new virus strains, has been identified as the most likely source of the disease.

Compounding fears in Hong Kong was mainland China's announcement on Wednesday that a pneumonia outbreak there was far worse than previously thought, with 31 people dead in southern Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong, and about 800 infected.