Singapore traces SARS "super spreader"

Singapore traces SARS "super spreader"

Jason Szep Reuters Singapore

Singapore's largest hospital struggled to contain the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus on Friday after tracing the origin of a mysterious batch of infections -- a man in his 60s whose multiple ailments masked the illness while he unwittingly passed it on to 19 people.

Over the border in Malaysia, officials said 13 crew of a cruise ship which had sailed to Singapore and Thailand had been quarantined after one was identified as a "probable" SARS sufferer.

Singapore General Hospital, where 19 people, including staff, patients and visitors, have caught SARS in a week, fears the virus could have spread to other wards.

Nine people have died of 133 confirmed cases in the tiny city state -- a rate of 6.7 percent, above the global average of about 4 percent. It has the world's fourth-highest number of cases.

"We are facing an unprecedented situation. We are dealing with a serious, unseen threat," Singapore's minister of manpower, Lee Boon Yang, said on Thursday.

He was speaking as governments around the world tightened their defenses against SARS. Singapore has deployed surveillance cameras and the United States has broadened its definition of who is at risk.

Singapore General Hospital Medical Board chairman Tay Boon Keng listed the elderly Chinese man as a SARS "super spreader", and said he "fell through a crack" after being transferred from a hospital that handles SARS victims exclusively.

In green and clean Singapore meanwhile, ministers are following Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong's lead and abandoning handshakes in public crowds or when holding meetings.

Instead they are adopting a traditional Thai bow with both hands clasped.

In the former British colony of Hong Kong, hospital workers said the epidemic had pushed the health care system to the brink of collapse.

Worldwide, more than 110 people have died and nearly 3,000 have been infected.

A quarter of Hong Kong's 1,000 cases of SARS, marked by fever, cough and severe pneumonia, are health workers, including 12 diagnosed with the illness on Thursday.

Hong Kong said three more people had died of SARS, bringing the toll to 30 and officials feared the illness could spread through the city's crowded apartment blocks.

World Health Organization (WHO) teams were in Beijing and in China's Guangdong province, the source of the infection, but WHO infectious disease chief Dr David Heymann said they would like permission to look further.

"China is a worrisome area because (we) don't know what is going on outside Beijing," he said in an interview.

The United States widened its definition of people at risk of SARS, saying anyone who passed through an airport in an affected country should watch for symptoms of respiratory illness and contact a doctor immediately if they developed fever or cough.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes its strict measures and broad definition of who is a suspected SARS patient has helped keep the disease from spreading in the United States where there are 166 suspected cases in 30 states.

CDC and European researchers both said they had come closer to proving that a new virus from the coronavirus family causes SARS. They found the virus, which may have jumped from animals to humans, in most patients with SARS.

The CDC has developed three tests for the virus and is working to get a licensed version that can be used widely, although this could take at least a week and probably longer.