China plans massive civet cats cull - SARS link

Main Category: Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 05 Jan 2004 - 0:00 PDT


The Chinese government plans to cull 10,000 civet cats in wildlife markets after tests suggest a link to a possible SARS case, state television reports.

Civets are considered a delicacy in wild game restaurants in southern China.

The announcement Monday came after researchers at Hong Kong University said they found similarities between a virus found in the cats and in a suspected SARS patient in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

They suggested the virus may have come from civets and the sale of the animals should be banned.

'We will take resolute measures to close all the wildlife markets in Guangdong and to kill the civet cats,' Feng Liuxiang, deputy director of the province's health department, said Monday on the national noon newscast of China Central Television.

The suspected human case is a 32-year-old male from Guangdong who developed a fever on December 16 and was hospitalized four days later with pneumonia. He remains isolated in hospital in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong.

Laboratory tests on the patient by Chinese microbiologists have been inconclusive and results from tests by the World Health Organization are expected Monday or Tuesday.

Unlike influenza, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS has no known treatment and little is still known of its origins other than it sprang up in Guangdong province in November 2002.

The SARS virus belongs to the coronavirus family which also causes the common cold in humans.

SARS killed 774 people worldwide and sickened nearly 8,100 before subsiding in June.

The flu-like illness claimed 349 lives on China's mainland and more than 5,000 were stricken.

There have been two other confirmed cases of SARS since the WHO declared the epidemic over last year.

One was in Singapore in September and the other in Taiwan last month, both involving researchers working with the virus.

Meanwhile, a Philippine woman has been isolated in a Manila hospital as a suspected SARS case, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said Monday.

According to Dr. Yolanda Oliveros, the woman returned to the Philippines late last month after working in Hong Kong. She was brought to a provincial hospital January 1, complaining of a fever and was then transferred to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine in Manila, charged with tracking the nation's SARS cases.

Oliveros said the woman has been diagnosed with atypical pneumonia and is under isolation.

If her case shifts from a suspected SARS case to a probable case, the woman's contacts since late December will be traced and they will be isolated, Oliveros said.

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