Deadly virus still to reach peak in China

Health officials are warning that SARS has not yet peaked in China where it began, as countries around the world work to deny the virus a toehold in their territory.

In Panama, Miss Universe pageant organisers have said no contestants from SARS-hit areas will be allowed without a clean health record.

European health ministers, at an emergency meeting yesterday, agreed to increase co-ordination among their agencies and spend an extra €21m on research, including the search for a vaccine.

The first major study of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome trends found that out of the patients with cases serious enough to require hospitalisation, about one in five died and that more than half of those over 60 died.

New deaths reported yesterday in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore pushed the worldwide death toll to at least 480 people. More than 6,700 have been infected since the disease surfaced in China’s southern province of Guangdong in November.

The World Health Organisation’s director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, told the European health ministers gathered in Brussels, Belgium, that the SARS crisis in China had not yet peaked and that “there is obviously an increase in the outbreak going on”.

But she said a “window of opportunity” remained to keep it at bay.

“We still can contain the first new disease of this century and make it go away,” she said.

Although the ministers agreed to co-ordinate efforts on early detection of SARS, they failed to agree on screening at European ports and airports, fearing such measures would be too heavy-handed.

Europe has reported 33 probable cases but no deaths.

In China, strict measures have put more than 25,000 people in quarantine across the country, where news has slowly emerged of SARS-designated hospitals being attacked by mobs fearful that patients will infect their communities.

In parts of Beijing, teams have been deployed to seek out new cases. The disease’s symptoms include high fever, aches, coughing and shortness of breath.

China remains worst-hit by the respiratory illness, reporting 138 more cases and eight new fatalities yesterday, raising its death toll to 214. Beijing has about 2,000 cases of infection – nearly half the county’s total – and 107 deaths.

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said the outbreak in the Chinese capital “still remains grave”. He ordered officials at all levels to work hard to contain the virus or face punishment, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

In the first major study of SARS trends, scientists estimated that about 20 percent of those in hospital with SARS were dying from it, and that more than half of those over 60 died.

However, experts warn that the figures do not reflect the chances of an average person anywhere dying from a bout of SARS once it is contracted. The study focused on hospital patients in Hong Kong that had an average age of 50.

The Lancet study, by scientists at Imperial College in London, the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong health authorities, estimated that the death rate could be as high as 55% in people over the age of 60.

In people under 60, the death rate could be as low as 6.8%, the study found.

“That’s sadly still very high for a respiratory infection,” said Roy Anderson, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College. “In other common respiratory infections it is much less than 1% in the vulnerable elderly.”

Organisers of the Miss Universe pageant on June 3 in Panama City said that all contestants – but especially those representing countries most affected by SARS - would have to show medical documents certifying they were healthy before they will be allowed to participate.

Contestants from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada and other areas worst affected by the outbreak would have to provide extra proof they were healthy, organisers said, without elaborating.