SARS outbreak is now contained says World Health Organization

Main Category: Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 18 May 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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According to the WHO, China has contained the latest outbreak of SARS. However, there is still some confusion about where it all started - most experts are pointing to a government research laboratory while others dispute this.

There are only two patients now in hospital in quarantine, everyone else has been discharged. Most of the people who had been monitored came from Beijing and the province of Anhui, eastern China.

The WHO declared that "It has been more than three weeks since the last case was placed in isolation in China's latest SARS outbreak, prompting the World Health Organization to declare that the chain of human-to-human transmission appears to have been broken.".

Nine people came down with SARS in this latest outbreak. Health authorities kept 747 people under observation - these people had been in close contact with the infected nine.

Chinese health officials and the WHO are still trying to pinpoint the cause of the outbreak. Most fingers are still pointing at a state laboratory, a lab at the National Institute of Virology, Beijing. The lab had been experimenting with live SARS coronaviruses. The first cases of the latest outbreak had been working in this lab. They came down with SARS at the end of March of this year.

WHO declared that the "Investigators have serious concerns about biosafety procedures at the Institute -- including how and where procedures using SARS coronavirus were carried out, and how and where SARS coronavirus samples were stored."

WHO said countries should review their biosafety practices, especially in labs that are experimenting with live SARS viruses.

The last big outbreak of SARS started in China in 2002. It hit 30 countries, infected 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 people. That outbreak was finally contained in July, 2003, in China.

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