Waitress is new China SARS case suspect

A WAITRESS hospitalised in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou was declared the country's second suspected SARS case of the season yesterday, just as the first patient was pronounced recovered and released.

The 20-year-old waitress was hospitalised with a fever on December 31, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said she was under quarantine in Guangzhou's No 8 People's Hospital.

The announcement that she was officially a suspected case came just minutes after Xinhua reported that China's first SARS patient of the season, a 32-year-old television producer, left a Guangzhou hospital after being declared recovered.

The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, said it had dispatched a six-person team to Guangzhou to join Chinese health officials in investigating the first case.

"The joint mission's major concerns will centre around the potential human, animal and environmental sources of the SARS infection," WHO said in a statement.

In Shanghai, authorities detained an editor whose newspaper broke the news of China's first new SARS case. Cheng Yizhong, editor in chief of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, declined to comment on his reported questioning, but suggested the issue may have been resolved, without giving details.

Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, where the first outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome is believed to have begun in November 2002. It killed 58 people and spread worldwide, claiming 774 lives before subsiding. Earlier news reports said the waitress worked in a restaurant that served wild game. Scientists say the virus might have originated in wild animals.

Authorities in Guangdong are slaughtering thousands of civet cats a local delicacy and other animals seized from wildlife markets.

The city government says it plans to launch a campaign to kill rats tomorrow, the deadline for the civet slaughter. Experts are looking into whether the television producer might have been exposed to the virus by rats in his apartment complex. Phone calls to Guangzhou health authorities yesterday weren't answered. Guangzhou officials earlier in the week repeatedly denied reports in Hong Kong newspapers that the waitress was suspected of having SARS.

A spokesman in Beijing for the World Health Organisation, Roy Wadia, said he didn't immediately have any more information on the waitress's case. A spokesman at the WHO's Asian headquarters in Manila, Peter Cordingley, said China's Ministry of Health had informed the agency of what Chinese officials called a "possible suspected SARS case".

Health authorities were investigating how the waitress might have contracted the virus and were disinfecting her home and other places where she had been, news reports said.

Some 48 people who had "close contact" with her have been quarantined and 52 others were under unspecified "close medical observation", but none has shown symptoms.

The first patient, identified only by the surname Luo, also was treated at the No 8 People's Hospital.

"His condition improved daily with the conventional treatment," Xinhua said.