Russia said it was considering tough border restrictions with China, where experts say the SARS epidemic has yet to peak.

The latest scientific findings – published in The Lancet medical journal - show that SARS is killing one in five of patients in Hong Kong, including 55% of infected patients aged over 60.

In younger patients, 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 London's Imperial College epidemiologist who headed the study. "In other common respiratory infections it is much less than 1 percent in the vulnerable elderly."

International scientists and agencies point to wide global variations and still differ over what the chances are for an average person anywhere dying from it.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome continues to hit China hard despite tough public health measures, including mass quarantines, roadblocks, travel restrictions and some school shutdowns.

WHO said it will deploy an investigative team on Thursday to the densely populated northern province of Hebei, where the number of SARS infections has "risen sharply" in the past week, doubling to 98 between April 30 and May 4.

So far 113 cases have been reported in Hebei. The province borders Beijing - which has been worst affected by SARS epidemic.

The world SARS death toll stands at least 480. More than 6 700 have been infected since the disease surfaced in China's southern province of Guangdong in November. China has had 214 SARS deaths, nearly half of them in Beijing.

In Europe, health ministers at an emergency meeting on Tuesday agreed to increase early detection coordination among their agencies and spend an extra €20-million on research, including the development of a SARS vaccine.

However, they failed to agree on SARS screening at European ports and airports, fearing such measures would be too heavy-handed.

Europe has reported 33 probable cases, but no deaths.

[Sapa-AP]

 

 

Time Online Edition

Posted Sunday, April 27, 2003; 2:31 p.m. EST
So far, the U.S. has been lucky. It has been nearly six months since the SARS outbreak emerged and more than six weeks since the illness spread from its birthplace in southern China to put the world on alert. Yet with more than 4,800 cases in at least 26 countries to date, a disease that has rocked Asian markets, ruined the tourist trade of an entire region, nearly bankrupted airlines and spread panic through some of the world's largest countries has largely passed the U.S. by. Hospitals and schools were shut down last week in Beijing, thousands of people were put under quarantine, and rumors flew through the capital that martial law was about to be imposed. But in the U.S., only about 40 people are believed to have severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The number of cases doesn't seem to be growing, and—most reassuring of all—as of last Saturday, not a single victim had died.

But if Americans think that they have dodged the biological bullet, they had better think again. As the truth about SARS comes out—slowly, due in large part to government cover-ups in the land of its birth—it is becoming clear that what is taking place in Asia threatens the entire world. Epidemiologists have long worried about a highly contagious, fatal disease that could spread quickly around the globe, and SARS might end up confirming their worst fears. Microbes can go wherever jet airliners do these days, so it is a very real possibility that the disease has not yet shown its full fury. "We don't know the reason that we've been lucky so far," says Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), "but we're not taking any chances."

Americans should not count on their sophisticated health-care system to protect them. China may be relatively backward, but Hong Kong, with a modern medical system, has experienced about as many deaths as have been reported in the rest of China put together. And only a few hours' drive from Buffalo, N.Y., or Detroit, just across the Canadian border, a Western city that thought it had done just about everything possible to contain its outbreak keeps losing ground. A few weeks ago, Toronto believed that the epidemic was winding down. Now, with 20 deaths, it's the first place outside Asia to be put on a do-not-visit list issued by the World Health Organization (WHO)—a public humiliation that infuriated Toronto residents. ("I've never been so angry in my whole life," declared Mayor Mel Lastman.) Beijing and Shanxi province also joined the list last week; Hong Kong and Guangdong province, where the outbreak began, have been on it for weeks.

With fewer than 300 known SARS deaths so far, the worldwide toll is tiny compared with, say, the 3 million people who died of AIDS last year. But if SARS continues to spread, its numbers could skyrocket. Its overall death rate of about 6% is far lower than that of AIDS, Ebola or malaria, but if enough people catch the illness, even a low rate could cause a catastrophe. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19 had a death rate of less than 3%, but so many people became infected that it killed more than 20 million people in just 18 months. The financial toll, meanwhile, is already catastrophic. Economists predict that China and South Korea could each suffer some $2 billion in SARS-related losses in tourism, retail sales and productivity. Japan and Hong Kong stand to lose more than $1 billion apiece, and Taiwan and Singapore could lose nearly that much. In Canada, meanwhile, J.P. Morgan Securities Canada estimates that Toronto is losing $30 million a day. All told, says WHO, the global cost of SARS is approaching $30 billion.

And nobody can forecast how much worse it could get. The more victims there are, the greater the chance that SARS will spread—and there may be a lot more cases in China than anyone realizes. It's hard to gather information in such a vast country under the best of circumstances, but the actions of Chinese officials have made the situation worse. In April the government finally grudgingly admitted that SARS is a problem and belatedly allowed in a WHO team to investigate. Soon doctors at Beijing hospitals began leaking word of a massive cover-up. The country's Health Minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed last week from their jobs and their Communist Party posts. Chinese officials have revised their numbers, but they are still not telling WHO about patterns of spread. "Right now," says Jeffrey McFarland, a member of the Beijing WHO team,"we're getting exactly the same information as the press."

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December 2002

HIV/AIDS WORLDWIDE

HIV/AIDS IN THE UNITED STATES

WHO - World Health Organisation Publication

AIDS Epidemic Update 2002

WHO has released on 26 November, in collaboration with UNAIDS, the AIDS Epidemic Update, December 2002 with estimates based on the most recent available data on the spread of HIV in countries around the world.

There are 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS world-wide. 38.6 million of these are adults, 19.2 million are women and 3.2 million are children under the age of 15. Five million new infections with HIV occured in 2002 of which 4.2 million were adults and 2 million of them were women. A total of 3.1 million people died of HIV/AIDS related causes in 2002.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of HIV positive individuals (29.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS) followed by South and South-East Asia (6 million). In North America there are 980,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, 570,000 in Western Europe and 1.2 million in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The number of HIV positive individuals in Australia and New Zealand has remained constant since 2001 (15,000 people). In Latin America and the Caribbean the figure is 1.5 million and 440,000 respectively. East Asia and the Pacific have 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS. North Africa and the Middle East have 550,000 people living with HIV/AIDS.