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Killer flu claims another
15/03/2003 16:33 - (SA)
Christina Toh-Pantin and Tan Ee Lyn
Hanoi - A mystery flu-like virus that has infected scores of people in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore and sparked a global warning from the World Health Organisation, has claimed the life of a nurse in Hanoi.
The death is the second reported in Asia in three days. A 50-year-old American businessman died in Hong Kong on Thursday after being flown from Hanoi with respiratory problems.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) warned in Geneva on Saturday of a "worldwide health threat" as a killer pneumonia spread from east Asia to other parts of the globe.
Releasing a rare "emergency travel advisory", the United Nations health agency said an ill passenger had been taken to an isolation unit in Germany on Saturday after being removed from a plane en route to Singapore from New York.
A WHO spokesman said there were also reports that two people had died in Canada, taking the death toll to eight since the first outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia, was detected in China in February.
The virus continues to spread in Hong Kong and Singapore with 11 new cases reported on Saturday. News of the disease has sparked a rash of travel cancellations to Hong Kong.
Forty-seven medical workers are now infected in Hong Kong and 37 have signs of severe pneumonia, up from 29 on Friday. Sixteen people have symptoms in Singapore, the health ministry said. Two have been discharged and the others are stable.
In Hanoi, 41 people are being treated for the illness and doctors from France and Japan are arriving in Vietnam this weekend to help deal with the disease.
High attack rate
"The dead person is a nurse of ours," said a doctor at the Vietnam-France hospital in Hanoi. "She was suffering from falling blood pressure and was one of the first two people infected."
Outside the hospital, one of a handful that cater to foreigners in Hanoi, relatives of the dead woman wailed and clutched a photo of her. The same hospital had treated the American who died later in Hong Kong.
In Geneva, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the passenger taken from the plane in Frankfurt was a Singapore doctor who had visited New York after treating some of the first suspected SARS patients in Singapore.
WHO issued a global disease alert earlier this week because of the speed at which it travels and because patients are not responding to the usual treatments for pneumonia, Thompson said.
"As reports of cases are confirmed, you will see that there is a very high attack rate. When they get sick, they get very sick," he added.
In Hong Kong, anxious residents swept surgical masks off shop shelves. "The government bought 10,000 masks for ambulance workers. How can we not be scared?" said a radio show caller.
An outbreak of severe pneumonia in China's southern Guangdong province in February infected 305 people, killing five, but it is not known if there is a link with the latest outbreak.
Health authorities in Taiwan said on Saturday a woman developed signs of pneumonia after visiting China's Guangdong province in late February, bringing to three the number of people in Taiwan battling the disease.
The contagious respiratory illness follows a bird-flu virus that killed a Hong Kong man and infected his son in February. The father's illness deteriorated into pneumonia before he died.
But the government has said the new virus is not H5N1, which sparked a global WHO alert in February. Six people in Hong Kong died of H5N1 in 1997 when it jumped mysteriously from bird to human, sparking fears of an epidemic.
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