Tracking a Killer Virus

 

It was on March 10, 2003, that Dr Clive Cockram and his colleagues at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong found themselves at the front of one of the most troubling epidemics in a decade. At noon, it was announced that the hospital’s doctors and nurses had begun filling up the emergency wards – as patients. They reported trouble breathing, severe muscle pain and high fever. Their mystery illness wasn’t responding to treatment. The healthy staff took to dressing from head to toe in protective gear. … (1) Many of his colleagues slept in their offices. In a few days, the wards filled up with more than 90 patients. “It was heart breaking,” he says. “This was a new disease, and we didn’t know what to do. We felt so helpless.”

The disease, dubbed SARS for severe acute respiratory syndrome, has been the most vexing in the past decade. Although SARS has a relatively low mortality rate – less than 4 percent – it attacks the young and healthy as well as the old and frail. … (2) SARS also spreads across borders with alarming speed. By April, it had struck about 1,500 patients in 14 countries and killed at least 54. … (3) Hong Kong and Singapore shut down schools and quarantined anyone who had come into close contact with patients. And health workers began distributing fliers at airports and training personnel to screen at-risk passengers. Hong Kong researchers hoped to make available a new disease test. “I don’t believe SARS will become a pandemic,” says David Heymann, the Geneva-based head of communicable diseases for the WHO. “Overall, I think it’s a positive picture.”

That’s not to say, of course, that more people won’t get sick. …(4) With two late-90s flu outbreaks under their belts, Hong Kong health-care workers were quick to begin interviewing patients and sending out questionnaires. The WHO conducted a massive coordination campaign, distributing data among authorities in all the affected areas. Epidemiologists pored over the research, looking for patterns. A physician in Hong Kong, reading the e-mail traffic, first pinpointed the territory’s Metropole Hospital as SARS’s jumping-off point beyond southern China. In February, a Guangdong doctor staying at the hotel infected 12 people, who then unwittingly disseminated the bug around the world.

China’s attempts to cover up the outbreak, which first emerged in November 2002, contributed to the severity of the epidemic. … (5) The team quickly verified that the pneumonia outbreak in Guangdong was likely caused by the same pathogen. Chinese authorities raised their estimate of affected patients in Guangdong from 305 to 792, but insisted that in Beijing only 10 people had contracted the disease and three had died. Health workers suspected that China was understating the numbers. … (6) “We were told to keep our mouths shut about it,” she told NEWSWEEK. Journalists, too, were muzzled.

Even without China’s help, a 10-day search by 11 labs in 9 countries nabbed the likely pathogen – a previously unknown member of the coronavirus family, a cousin of the common cold. “This is the first time the WHO has coordinated such a large number of laboratories,” said Barbara Ebert, a scientist at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, a part of the WHO network.

The story isn’t over. Scientists still don’t know whether the microbe came from an animal like HIV, or if it’s a mutated human virus. … (7) The WHO has been bracing for a new influenza pandemic in China ever since several new flu viruses arose from birds in the late 1990s. SARS may be just a warm-up.

(From ‘Newsweek’)

 

Scan article 2 and find answers to the following questions.

1. What did the way China fought the SARS epidemic remind people of?

2. What was unorthodox about China’s approach to fighting SARS?

3. What was the traditional argument in favour of democracies preventing disasters?

4. What factor gave China an advantage in fighting SARS?

5. What was the reaction of the Chinese to calls to fight the epidemic?

6. Who received cash rewards in China during the epidemic?

7. What measures were taken in Singapore and Taiwan to contain the epidemic?