WHO Warns of SARS Resurgence, Urges Vigilance
Date: 09-Sep-03
Country: PHILIPINES
Author: Dolly Aglay
"None of us can predict what will happen later this year. Will SARS come back or not?" director-general Lee Jong-wook told a five-day WHO regional committee meeting in Manila.
"We have to prepare on the assumption that this will come back. Our challenge now is to enhance surveillance networks that will detect and deal with SARS if it does come back," Lee said in his opening address.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome killed more than 800 people after it apparently jumped to humans from animals in southern China late last year and was then spread worldwide by travelers.
It infected a total of about 8,500 people, trimmed economic growth and cost billions of dollars in lost business.
"We are certain that the human-to-human transmission of the virus stopped in July and it hasn't come back yet. But the virus is still out there," Peter Cordingley, WHO's head of public information in the Western Pacific region, told Reuters.
"We think it's quite likely lurking in the wild animal population in southern China. There's absolutely no guarantee that it won't jump the species barrier again and come back."
WHO officials and other medical experts have said they are not sure if SARS, which has no known cure, was a disease confined to winter months.
"We don't know anything about this virus really. We know it has a name, but we are not sure where it comes from. We don't know how it spread," Cordingley said.
He said the WHO does not expect a SARS vaccines to be developed soon because the scientific work on where the virus came from and how it spread to humans was not yet complete.
Researchers in Singapore said last week they had developed a test kit capable of detecting the virus in 15 minutes.
Other officials said flu cases reported recently in China, Hong Kong and the Canadian city of Vancouver turned out not to be associated with SARS.
SPREAD FROM ANIMALS
The WHO suspects that SARS originated from wild animals commonly used for food in China.
"We think there is good reason to suspect that this virus comes from civet cats, raccoon dogs. We don't know which animal," Cordingley said.
The WHO criticized Beijing's decision last month to lift a ban imposed in May on the sale of 54 species.
In a recent study conducted on about 100 animal species by a team of Chinese and U.N. zoological disease specialists, some species showed a positive result for a virus similar to the one that causes SARS.
"It's an internal matter of the Chinese government, and we don't have any policy-making rule in China, but we have told them that we think this is premature," Cordingley said.
"We think it will just make life difficult for everybody."