Health Authorities ask for Calm

The New South Wales Minister for Health, Morris Iemma, has been quoted as saying that there is no cuase for alarm in regards to the suspected SARS cases reported in two Chinese flight attendants now residing in a Darlinghurst hospital in Sydney.

Mr Iemma says the health system is ready and fully prepared should a fresh outbreak occur.”The message to the public is that we’ve got plans of action that exist to help contain SARS that worked very successfully last time,” he said. “Those plans are still there and the message to the public is that we will introduce them we will take all the appropriate action.”Two employees of China Southern Airline were admitted on Wednesday and remain in isolation in St Vincent’s hospital in Darlinghurst after arriving in Sydney from Guangzhou via Melbourne.If the flight attendants test positive to SARS, passengers on board the flight will be contacted and screened.Australia scaled down its measures to detect and respond to SARS after the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) announcement on July 5 last year that the person-to-person transmission of the virus had been broken. The virus, spread by travellers, infected more than 8,000 people and killed 800 in 31 countries last year.New strain:Chinese health officials have reported one confirmed case of SARS and two suspected cases in the Chinese province of Guangdong since the SARS was said to be contained last July. The three patients were “nowhere near as sick as many of the patients were last year”, said Robert Breiman, head of a WHO team probing SARS in Guangzhou. “It’s also possible that the SARS virus that is causing the infections, at least so far, is different somehow in its ability to transmit easily and also in its virulence, the level of severity of illness that it causes,” he told Reuters. He cautioned against letting one’s guard down. “It’s possible that the same sorts of super spreading events that occurred last year could occur at some point this year.” A leading SARS expert at the University of Hong Kong said the present strain of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome was not a descendant of last year’s virus.”The virus this year is a new virus strain. It behaves like a virus in an animal and is not well adapted to humans, so its transmission ability is low,” said microbiologist Guan Yi. “That is why contacts of these victims (in China) have not been infected,” said the expert. The SARS scare was overshadowed this week as Asia faced a new health threat in bird flu, with WHO confirming that the disease had killed three people in Vietnam. But with one confirmed and 3 suspected cases in China, and now the prospect of a further two chinese nationals infected, SARS could very well be making a comeback.(Source: ABC Health News, Jan 15 2004)