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Guynemer
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Regular old run-o-the-mill pneumonia that we see here in Ann Arbor all the time has a higher fatality rate than this illness.
Much ado about nothing.
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Edan
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The US? Do you mean Canada?
http://www.healthcentral.com/news/N...t.cfm?id=512257
quote:
Hanoi has reported at least 42 cases of the illness, Hong Kong has 43, Singapore at least 16. Tapei reported three people hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Guangdong province, which adjoins Hong Kong in China, reported 305 cases by mid-February, including five deaths.
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Of course, one of the problems is that they aren't sure all of these are the same disease.
With about ~450 cases and about 8 or 9 deaths, the fatality rate is about 2% (although we don't know how many of those in serious conditions will survive).
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DaShi
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The Taste of Japan
Sep 2000
time: 05:26
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Update on China's simply amazing efforts to coorporate with the WHO.
quote:
More Cases Question Beijing's Candor on New Pneumonia
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
EIJING, March 19 — Just one day after Chinese officials announced that an outbreak of an unusually deadly pneumonia was "effectively under control," news of previously unreported, potential cases emerged from a military hospital in Beijing, suggesting that the government was not being fully candid with international health agencies seeking to curb an emerging worldwide epidemic.
This month two patients, a husband and wife, died from an atypical pneumonia at an infectious-disease hospital in Beijing, a doctor said. The doctor added that a group of doctors and nurses who treated the patients was now showing symptoms of pneumonia as well.
All over the world, such "index" patients have infected health care workers in a wave of secondary spreading of the disease.
Chinese health officials have said that all of the country's cases so far — 305 patients, 5 of whom have died — were clustered in the southern province of Guangdong. They asserted that the domestic outbreak peaked in February and was now petering out.
"The patients have recovered gradually and are resuming their normal lives," a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, said this week.
The unusual pneumonia, which the World Health Organization has confirmed in 219 people outside of China with at least 4 deaths, causes a serious breathing condition called severe acute respiratory syndrome. Though so far concentrated in East Asia, cases have cropped up as far away as Germany and Canada, spread by sick patients traveling along airline routes.
Most scientists believe that the new disease first emerged in Guangdong late last year, and international health officials say that the initial lack of cooperation from China in reporting its data has seriously hampered their efforts to understand a new global health threat.
Health statistics in China concerning a wide range of diseases, from tuberculosis to AIDS, are regarded as politically sensitive and so are often misrepresented or never made public. This week, the Chinese government ordered Chinese journalists not to report on the outbreak of the strange pneumonia, a reporter at a large newspaper in Guangdong said.
Ian Simpson, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, said that Chinese health officials had given them no information about potential cases outside of Guangdong, but that its field workers had "heard rumors" and were checking them out. It is not clear where the couple in Beijing may have contracted the disease.
But some doctors here have long been skeptical of the government's claim that the disease was confined to the area around Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, since sick airline passengers have carried it all over the globe.
"It is impossible that it wouldn't be here because there is so much air travel," a doctor in Beijing said. "But the government is keeping a tight lid on it."
There are 18 flights a day from Guangzhou to Beijing and 17 from Guangzhou to Shanghai, and there is little reason to think the disease would not move along those routes as well.
Scientists in Hong Kong and Germany said on Tuesday that they might have identified the virus responsible for the outbreak, a paramyxovirus that belongs to the family of germs that includes measles. If that proved conclusive, it would help explain why the virus spread so readily to doctors and nurses taking care of these patients: the germ is so small that it passes through ordinary surgical masks.
Special surgical mask with smaller pores were on sale at some hospitals in Beijing today.
There were scattered reports today of new suspected cases in Europe, all in patients who had traveled from Southeast Asia. French health officials said a patient from Hanoi — now in Orléans, in central France — was believed to have the first case in that country. They gave no further details.
"This shows the situation is not under control yet, and we remain on maximum sanitary alert," the health minister, Jean-François Mattei, said in Parliament.
Irish health authorities said they had two suspected cases, both from Southeast Asia. Both are in isolation wards in a Dublin hospital.
Doctors said the first patient seemed to be recovering well, but local news reports carried headlines about the arrival of a "killer bug."
Fears over the disease forced a flight from Paris to Atlanta to stop at Shannon Airport near Limerick on Tuesday, after a 6-month-old girl showed symptoms that turned out to be ordinary pneumonia.
Although the first cases of an unusual pneumonia in Guangdong were reported by the local Chinese press last November, information from the government has generally been scant. Chinese officials agree to the involvement of the World Health Organization just two weeks ago. This week, for the first time, they provided the W.H.O. with a report on the epidemic.
"Persuading the Chinese health officials to let them look at their records to figure out what had happened was a gargantuan task," a foreign doctor said. "But now they are getting more cooperation."
As the death toll around Guangzhou mounted this winter, giving rise to panicky runs on antibiotics and traditional medicines, even the Chinese state-controlled news media became incensed, demanding the release of more information. But in the end, little more was made public, and the government told newspapers that there was to be no further reporting on the topic.
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Clearly they are learning from their AIDS mistakes. 
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18-03-2003 03:32
) present.
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