Releasing a rare "emergency travel advisory," the United Nations
(news
- web
sites) health agency said an ill passenger had been taken to an
isolation unit in Frankfurt, Germany, on Saturday after being
removed from a plane en route from New York to Singapore.
Some 155 other passengers who had been due to change planes or
stay in Frankfurt were placed in quarantine there, while the
remaining 85 passengers and 20 crew on the Singapore Airlines flight
continued their journey, German officials said.
A spokesman for the Geneva-based WHO said there were reports two
people had died in Canada, taking the death toll to nine worldwide
since the first outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS), an atypical pneumonia whose cause is not yet known, was
detected in China in February.
"This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide health threat," WHO
director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a statement.
Among the dead is an American businessman taken ill in Hanoi
after visiting Shanghai. He died on Thursday in Hong Kong where 47
cases have been reported.
Some 40 people were being treated in Hanoi, where one nurse died
on Saturday, according to local health officials. Cases have also
been reported in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the passenger taken from the
plane in Frankfurt was a Singapore doctor who had visited New York
after treating some of the first suspected SARS patients in
Singapore.
"If the suspicion (of pneumonia) is confirmed, the transit
passengers will have to remain under observation in quarantine for
seven days in order to diagnose any possible infection and prevent
the disease spreading," the Social Affairs Ministry in the state of
Hesse, which includes Frankfurt, said in a statement.
HIGH ATTACK RATE
WHO issued its first global alert for 10 years earlier this week
because of the speed at which the disease travels and because
patients are not responding to the usual treatments for pneumonia,
Thompson said.
"As reports of cases are confirmed, you will see that there is a
very high attack rate. When they get sick, they get very sick," he
said.
"We have been doing tests for weeks now in the world's best
laboratories and we still do not know whether it is a virus or
bacteria," the spokesman added.
Most of the latest cases have been among hospital workers.
The first outbreak was reported in February in China's southern
Guangdong province, where 305 people were infected and five people
died.
Singapore and Taiwan have issued travel warnings after some cases
followed trips to Hong Kong or mainland China.
It was after a visit to Hong Kong, where anxious locals have been
sweeping surgical masks off pharmacy shelves, that a Canadian woman
died of severe pneumonia on March 5. Her son, who did not travel
with her, also fell sick and died.
In its alert, WHO said travelers and airline crews needed to be
aware of the first symptoms, which include high temperature and
difficulty in breathing.
It was also likely that anybody taken ill would have been in
contact with a person diagnosed with the disease or who had traveled
to an area where cases had been reported, the alert said.
But WHO said it was not calling for restrictions in travel to any
area. (--Additional reporting by Michael Steen in Frankfurt)
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