TUESDAY, March 29, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- The SARS virus may be able to spread through the air and not just through direct person-to-person contact, according to two new studies.
One study was conducted in Toronto, Canada, during the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak there in 2003. Researchers collected air samples from the SARS units of four hospitals and detected the SARS coronavirus in the air of one patient's room. It's the first confirmation of the virus in the air of an infected patient's hospital room, they said.
The researchers noted that they did not document any cases of airborne transmission of SARS from an infected patient to another person, only the release of the virus into the air through the breathing or coughing of an infected patient.
The second study, from Hong Kong, found that patients in hospital bays closest to a SARS patient had much higher infection rates than patients in distant bays. The study found that 50 percent of patients in an adjacent bay became infected with SARS, compared with 18 percent of patients in distant hospital bays.
The Hong Kong researchers said that while they have no direct proof of airborne transmission of SARS, the higher rates of infection among patients closest to the SARS patients suggests it is possible.
"No other known routes of infectious diseases transmission could adequately explain the spread of the disease in the outbreak, and hence we feel that the evidence is quite strong," lead researcher Dr. Ignatius T.S. Yu of the Chinese University of Hong Kong said in a prepared statement.
The Canadian research appears in the May 1 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases; the Hong Kong study can be found in the May 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about SARS.
