China SARS patient recovering

Main Category: Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 07 Jan 2004 - 0:00 PDT


China has announced that its first Sars patient since last year's outbreak has fully recovered from the disease.

State news agency Xinhua said the 32-year-old TV producer is expected to leave hospital on Thursday.

The news came as criticism mounted of a mass cull of civet cats in Guangdong province, prompted by the man's case.

Researchers say there may be a link between civets and the man's Sars strain, but critics say the slaughter is inhumane and possibly unnecessary.

Guangdong authorities have begun to kill up to 10,000 of the animals by drowning them in disinfectant and then electrocuting and incinerating them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) criticised the cull, saying there is no firm evidence that civets carry Sars and that the slaughter might erase clues about how the disease spread, and also risked spreading it.

It also warned that not enough research had been conducted into possible links between the civet cat and Sars.

'At this point in time... without seeing that data, there is no conclusive evidence that civets are the animals that carry the Sars virus,' WHO Sars team leader Judy Hall told the BBC.

Animal rights activists said the cull should be carried out in a way which ensures minimal suffering.

'Drowning is quite inhumane as it takes about a few minutes before the animal dies,' said Ng Cho-nam, director of the Conservancy Association in Hong Kong.

'If we used knives to kill them, the blood would spread the disease,' a Guangdong official told Reuters news agency.

Xinhua said the man whose virus had sparked the cull has had no fever for more than a week, and has no other symptoms of the flu-like disease.

It quoted Tang Xiaoping, president of the No 8 People's Hospital in Guangzhou, as hoping that 'society would embrace the man and let him return to a normal life as soon as possible'.

An additional 25 people who had contact with the patient have been isolated, but none appears to be infected.

Hong Kong and Taiwan have stepped up their monitoring of visitors from China, which had been Sars-free for six months before the latest case was confirmed on Monday.

In the Philippines, authorities are monitoring 38 people who may have come into contact with a woman who may have become will with the virus in Hong Kong. The woman and her husband showed signs of improvement on Tuesday.

Trust

The BBC's Louisa Lim, in Beijing, says that in contrast to the last outbreak more than a year ago, there has been little sense of panic.

People are generally confident that the government has the situation under control, our correspondent says.

Sars killed 349 people on China's mainland during the previous global outbreak.

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