Too early to talk of pandemic

2003-04-27 12:40

Paris - It is "too early" to know whether there is a danger of the atypical pneumonia Sars becoming a pandemic like tuberculosis or AIDS, a World Health Organisation expert said on Sunday.

Such a scenario must be avoided, hence the alert issued by the WHO, epidemioloist Isabelle Natal said in an interview on France-Inter radio.

She said the most frightening aspects of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) were that "it is a new disease for which we have no treatment," and that hospital staff were "in the front line" at risk of contracting the disease, and that it was being spread "ultra rapidly" by air travel.

"What is certain is that China's lack of transparency at the beginning meant two or three months were lost in setting up a proper system to alert and inform," she said.

She said it was "worrying" that the hospital sector was affected, which she described as "one of the characteristics of this disease." But she noted that that had been the case at the outset of the Sars outbreak in Hanoi, "where we are now seeing the end of the epidemic, because there have been no new cases for three weeks."

That shows that "even if there is pressure on the hospital system, we can manage to get it under control," she said.

SARS mortality was currently running at "five to six percent, against three to four percent at the onset of the epidemic," she said.

She confirmed that the main areas at risk remained China and Hong Kong, "with 90 percent of cases and 80 percent of deaths," followed by Singapore, Toronto in Canada, Taiwan and Vietnam.

According to its most recent figures, issued on Saturday, the WHO has recorded 4 836 probable cases of Sars in 28 countries, 293 of them fatal.

- AFX