New SARS warning by health officials

THE head of the World Health Organisation warned health specialists yesterday of a possible resurgence of the deadly SARS virus and urged countries to boost surveillance.

The warning came as Signapaore reported a new outbreak of the virus, the first three months.

“None of us can predict what will happen later this year.” Director-General Lee Jong-wook told a WHO regional committee meeting in Manila, the Philippines.

“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,” Mr 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 travellers.

The syndrome infected 238 people in Singapore, killing 33, the highest after China, Hong Kong, Canada and Taiwan.

It infected a total of about 8,500 people, trimmed economic growth and cost billions of euro in lost business.

Mr Lee and other WHO officials also said governments needed to raise their guard against “old diseases”, such as leprosy, and stressed the need to contain the spread of AIDS and tuberculosis.

Philippine Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit said diseases that were making a comeback in the Western Pacific region included filariasis, a mosquito-borne disease, leprosy and rabies.

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 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 said.

Mr Cordingley said the WHO does not expect a SARS vaccine to be developed soon because the scientific work on where the virus came from and how it spread to humans was not yet complete.

The WHO suspects that SARS originated from wild animals commonly used for food in China, such as civet cats and racoon dogs.

The WHO criticised 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 UN zoological disease specialists, some species showed a positive result for a virus similar to the one that causes SARS.