China plans civet cull as SARS case confirmed

China, faced with the return of SARS, has ordered wild animals slaughtered by the thousands in the disease’s suspected region of origin.

The striking response has led to calls for caution from doctors concerned about safety and destroying medical evidence.

The decision to kill up to 10,000 civet cats and other speciality-food creatures in the wildlife markets of the southern province of Guangdong came yesterday as the first case of SARS in China this season was confirmed after more than two weeks of tests.

The animals are suspected of being SARS carriers.

Adding to Asia’s SARS unease, a husband and wife in the Philippines who fell ill after the wife returned from Hong Kong were placed in isolation to await test results.

Philippine health officials said today they were observing up to 10 people who may have been in close contact with the wife.

Blood test results of the 42-year-old woman and her feverish husband, were expected tomorrow, officials said.

Those under observation include their two children and members of the woman’s immediate family, a doctor who treated her, and patients in a provincial hospital intensive care unit where she was first admitted.

In China, the World Health Organisation, upgrading the case of a 32-year-old Guangdong television producer from suspected SARS to a definite diagnosis, urged calm.

It said China, which became a travel pariah during the first outbreak last year, was safe.

“We have to be very clear about it: It does not mean that one case can lead to a public health threat,” said Dr Henk Bekedam, the WHO representative for China. But the national government warned its citizens: “Be vigilant.”

China’s leadership, criticised for a sluggish response to the debut of SARS last year, lurched in the other direction with an extraordinary, aggressive decision: to eradicate civets from Guangdong’s wildlife markets, where they are sold as delicacies and are a strong part of the local economy.

“We will take resolute measures to close all the wildlife markets in Guangdong and to kill the civet cats,” said Feng Liuxiang, vice director of the Guangdong Health Department.

Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, said species related to civets would also be killed, including raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, hog badgers and Eurasian badgers.

The slaughter would be completed by Saturday, the government said. It was not clear when the cull would begin, or who would carry it out and how.

Guangdong’s wildlife markets were ordered closed yesterday, and the provincial Forestry Department put 2,030 presumably doomed civet cats in quarantine. The official Xinhua News Agency called the civet a “major SARS virus carrier”.

WHO is less definitive about civet-SARS links. One of its animal experts, Dr Jeffrey Gilbert, emphasised that while the weasel-like mammals have been “implicated” in the disease’s possible transfer from animals to humans, definitive proof was elusive.

He called the mass slaughter a “radical step” that would have to be done carefully to avoid contaminating people and places. Also, any reckless cull could eliminate clues to the illness’s “animal reservoir”, he said.

“There is a potential hazard there,” Dr Gilbert said.

SARS, which first broke out in Guangdong in November 2002, infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774 worldwide – mostly in Asia – before it was brought under control in June. In China, 349 died.