HK searches for new treatment
2003-04-20 10:06
Hong Kong - As the death toll in Hong Kong from severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) rises alarmingly, health officials are desperately searching for alternative treatment methods to tackle the worrying trend.
Hong Kong announced 12 more deaths from Sars on Saturday - the biggest single day death toll since the outbreak took a grip on the territory six weeks ago.
The latest fatalities took the death toll in the city to 81, including 49 in the past eight days, while there are over 1 300 confirmed cases of the illness.
Despite the spike in deaths which has raised the Sars mortality rate from 4.5 percent to six percent in Hong Kong, Hospital Authority executive manager Liu Shao-haei insisted most patients were still responding to treatment.
However he said a small percentage of patients simply did not respond and that doctors did not know why.
With no cure, vaccine or diagnostic test for the illness, hospitals in Hong Kong have been treating Sars patients with a cocktail of drugs combining Ribovarin with steroids to reduce inflammation of the lungs.
Although officials maintain the combination has a 95 percent success rate, the recent spate of deaths has led them to re-evaluate the use and dosage of the drugs being used.
One approach would be to tackle the virus directly and "see whether we have other agents that are even better or have a synergistic effect with Ribovarin," said Health Secretary Yeoh Eng-kiong.
"Sometimes we find that two drugs are better than one, so you attack the virus at two points of its biology."
'Patients are dying from multiple organ failure'
Yeoh said that while medical workers were attempting to find a drug that was more effective than Ribovarin, none was currently available.
The head of intensive care at Princess Margaret Hospital, Tom Buckley, said the condition of many patients who were not yet in intensive care had been deteriorating.
"Patients are dying from multiple organ failure," Buckley told the Sunday Morning Post. "We are now looking at doses and at other possible drugs."
In some of the six percent of cases where patients did not respond to treatment, doctors were trying immune-boosters and drugs used to treat Aids patients, said Head of the department of microbiology at Hong Kong university, Yuen Kwok-yung.
The announcement of the territory's first double-digit daily death toll also raised concern at the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The WHO noted on its website that "some deaths are now occurring in younger, previously healthy persons as well as in the elderly and persons with underlying disease".
WHO spokesperson Dick Thompson said he was particularly concerned with the death of relatively young sufferers on Saturday.
"It's very worrisome. Most of the 12 were in their 70s and 80s. There was one male, 37-years-old, who didn't have any other illnesses and two other patients who died who were in the mid-50s. So we have to find out what caused these deaths," he told local radio.
The former British colony has been devastated by the Sars epidemic since the WHO issued a travel advisory on April 2 warning against travel to Hong Kong and the neighbouring Chinese province of Guangdong where the virus is believed to have originated.
The key tourism industry has been battered hardest with some 40 percent of all flights cancelled. Many streets, shops and restaurants are also empty as fear-struck residents stay at home.