Rats to be exterminated in new SARS onslaught

Rats are the latest target in the dramatic anti-SARS campaign in China, where as many as 10,000 civet cats are being slaughtered over fears that some animals might be spreading the disease to humans.

Officials said today that the entire rat population of the southern city of Guangzhou must be wiped out.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Guangzhou Health Bureau denied a Hong Kong news report that a waitress in a restaurant that serves wild game had tested positive for SARS antibodies, indicating she might have been exposed to the virus.

Rat extermination begins on Saturday, which is the government’s deadline for killing thousands of civets and related animals seized from wildlife markets in Guangzhou and surrounding Guangdong province.

“Guangzhou’s carpet extermination of rats,” said a headline in the newspaper Information Daily. It said “the whole city united will go about killing rats, not leaving out one household”.

Guangzhou is the site of China’s first confirmed SARS case this season, a 32-year-old television producer. The order to kill civets came after genetic tests showed a possible link between the patient and a virus found in the animals. Experts are also investigating whether the man might have been exposed to the virus by rats in his apartment building.

Since late on Sunday, health authorities in Guangdong have been drowning, electrocuting and incinerating hundreds of civets – a local delicacy – and related animals seized from wildlife markets.

The government says the order affects some 10,000 civets.

The government says the television producer has recovered and should leave the hospital on Thursday. He went into hospital on December 20.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome is believed to have emerged in Guangdong in November 2002, possibly jumping from animals to humans. It killed 58 people in the province and a total of 774 worldwide – mostly in Asia – before subsiding in June.

:: A Filipino woman suspected of having SARS after returning from Hong Kong has tested negative for the disease, the Philippine health secretary announced. “We are declaring her a case of bacterial pneumonia, not a SARS case,” Manuel Dayrit said.