SARS in China

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2004-5-4

Broadcast May 5, 2004

This is Phoebe Zimmermann with the VOA Special English Health
Report.

China has been dealing recently
with new cases of the lung disease SARS. SARS is severe acute
respiratory syndrome. Chinese officials reported a small number of
cases as of last week. All were linked to employees of a disease
control laboratory in Beijing or people close to them.

Last Friday the Health Ministry confirmed the first death from
SARS since last year. The victim was a woman who died in late April
in the eastern province of Anhui. She was the mother of a student
researcher who became infected at the laboratory and traveled home
to Anhui.

Officials are keeping hundreds of people away from others to
observe them for signs of SARS. Last Friday tens of millions of
Chinese began to travel for a week-long May Day holiday. Officials
were at airports and train stations to watch for sick travelers.

New research shows that the SARS virus can travel through the
air. Scientists from Hong Kong reported their findings in the New
England Journal of Medicine.

Last year, in Hong Kong, more than three-hundred people got SARS
in the Amoy Gardens housing project. Experts were not sure how the
infection spread from building to building. A team of researchers
decided to use computers to recreate conditions there. Ignatius Yu
from Chinese University of Hong Kong led the team.

The study centered on the buildings where the first
one-hundred-eighty-seven cases of SARS were reported. The team
connected the position of where each person lived with information
about airflow in and around the buildings.

They say the virus first began to spread in March of last year
when a visitor used a toilet in one of the buildings. This person
was sick from SARS. The bathroom with the toilet had an exhaust fan
for airflow.

Investigators from the World Health Organization later examined
the pipes in the bathroom. They found conditions that could have
permitted the fan to pull the virus up into the air system of the
building. The researchers who did the new study say wind then
carried the virus to other buildings. The virus traveled on drops of
water so small they could not be seen.

Experts say SARS began in mainland China in November
two-thousand-two. It infected eight-thousand people worldwide last
year. Seven-hundred-seventy-four deaths were reported.

This VOA Special English Health Report was written by Jerilyn
Watson. I'm Phoebe Zimmermann.


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