SARS Is Declared to Be Contained Around World

HONG KONG, July 5 The World Health Organization declared today that SARS had been contained around the world, with no new cases reported to the agency by any country since June 15. But it warned that the disease could still pose a threat.

HONG KONG, July 5 The World Health Organization declared today that SARS had been contained around the world, with no new cases reported to the agency by any country since June 15. But it warned that the disease could still pose a threat.The W.H.O. removed the last place on its list of SARS-affected areas, Taiwan. No new cases have been found there for 20 days, a span the agency believes to be twice the disease’s incubation period.SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, has infected 8,439 people in 30 countries on five continents and has killed 812 people. Nearly 200 people with SARS are still being treated in hospitals around the world under strict isolation procedures to prevent them from infecting health-care workers.Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the W.H.O.’s director general, said close cooperation among health professionals around the world had contained the disease, but cautioned against overconfidence.”We must still remember that the world is not yet SARS-free,” she told reporters in a telephone conference call. “We know that one single case can spark a new outbreak.”Doctors still do not have a vaccine or a reliable cure for SARS. The disease has been controlled mainly by isolating patients quickly and quarantining anyone who has had close contact with them.American officials have warned that SARS, believed by doctors to be caused by a corona virus, may prove to be a seasonal disease that returns in the winter. Corona viruses are thought to cause a third of all cases of the common cold, an ailment with a strong seasonal pattern.But Dr. David L. Heymann, the W.H.O.’s executive director of communicable diseases, said in the same conference call that it was too soon to say whether SARS would prove seasonal. “It’s very important countries continue their surveillance for at least the next 12 months,” he said.Dr. Heymann also expressed confidence that the Chinese government was committed to quickly and accurately reporting any new cases that might appear of new illnesses. Authorities in China’s Guangdong Province covered up the disease after it first appeared last fall, and health officials in Beijing initially covered up the disease when it spread rapidly there this year.Some businesspeople have accused the W.H.O. of overreacting to SARS. Here in Hong Kong, the economy contracted during the nearly two months that a W.H.O. travel advisory was in effect, unemployment climbed to a record 8.3 percent, and hotels and airlines lost more than half of their customers.But Dr. Brundtland said she believed that her agency’s response had been appropriate.”Just imagine what would have happened if people had been traveling around with this disease, with no way of detecting it,” she said, noting that some countries had issued even broader and more strongly worded travel advisories.SARS appears to have jumped from animals to people in November in Guangdong Province, next to Hong Kong. But while masked palm civets, a Guangdong delicacy, have been found carrying nearly identical viruses, it is not known if a civet caused the first infection in people. Nor does anyone know if the virus first arose in civets or whether the civets caught it from other animals in the wildlife menageries found in Guangdong markets.The disease spread here in Hong Kong in late February, where it quickly infected hundreds in hospitals and in crowded apartment buildings. For reasons still not fully understood, the disease seemed to spread fastest in hospitals using very modern equipment. Hong Kong was also the site of the only case in which more than 300 people in an apartment complex caught the disease through apparently airborne transmission, in contrast with the close personal contact needed elsewhere.(Source: The New York Times, By KEITH BRADSHER, 5 July 2003)