SUNDAY, May 4, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- The virus that causes SARS appears to spread through feces more easily than previously thought, the World Health Organization announced Sunday.
The finding would help to explain a severe outbreak of the respiratory illness that sickened more than 300 people at a Hong Kong apartment complex where leaking sewage pipes were thought to be the source of the infection, the Associated Press reports. However, coughing and sneezing remain the primary vehicle for infection.
In other SARS developments Sunday, Hong Kong scientists announced that common disinfectants can kill the SARS virus in as little as five minutes.
But Japanese scientists have determined the germ can remain alive on plastic surfaces for up to four days in a temperature of 40 degrees. That means that if some with a SARS-contaminated hand touched a refrigerator -- which typically runs at a temperature of 40 degrees -- the virus could linger there for four days, the AP says.
Meanwhile, China, the epicenter of the SARS epidemic, has ordered that elementary and middle schools in Beijing, the nation's capital, remain closed for another two weeks in an effort to limit the virus' spread.
"The city's education department ordered the closure to prevent the spread of SARS among the 1.37 million students," the official Xinhua news agency said, Britain's itv.com reports.
Schools in the city, the area hardest hit by SARS in the world with about 100 new cases a day, were to resume classes May 8 after a two-week suspension.
Chinese officials reported seven more SARS deaths Sunday, and 163 new cases of infection -- the smallest number in the last week.
That would seem to lend credence to Beijing health officials' claim that the number of new cases appears to be leveling off in the city. But international health officials said the data about SARS patients in China remained too sketchy to support the claim the outbreak there was starting to run its course. And they point to China's initial reluctance to acknowledge the start of the epidemic in that country last fall, which many health officials say led to the current global SARS situation, The New York Times says.
China has had more SARS cases than all the other countries of the world combined -- more than 4,100 cases and an estimated 197 deaths.
Concern about SARS has prompted international soccer officials to move the Women's World Cup, scheduled for Sept. 23 to Oct. 11, from China, the Associated Press reports.
"It will be transferred to another country in view of the current health threat in China, which is greatly affected by the SARS epidemic," FIFA said in a statement. Possible host countries include the United States and Australia; China would host the tournament in 2007, according to the AP.
In other news, the Chinese government, in an unprecedented policy reversal, agreed to allow World Health Organization experts to travel to Taiwan Sunday to study the growing SARS epidemic there.
The decision ended a diplomatic standoff that the island said was hurting its ability to control the sometimes fatal respiratory illness. Since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, Beijing's communist leaders have insisted that Taiwan is a renegade province that falls under their jurisdiction, The New York Times reports.
Beijing said it wanted to help the island, which is struggling with a SARS outbreak that is surpassed only by mainland China's. Taiwan has seen its number of cases triple in the last week -- to 116, including eight deaths, the AP says.
The World Health Organization said it sent two doctors to Taiwan Sunday for medical and humanitarian reasons, the Times reports. "If SARS is a threat anywhere, it is a threat everywhere, so this is a matter of global health security," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said.
In Hong Kong, health officials said that none of 12 people originally infected with SARS who recovered and then got sick again had suffered a SARS relapse, as had been initially feared, the AP says.
But researchers in Hong Kong warn that the SARS virus is mutating rapidly. And that could make it much more difficult for scientists to develop a diagnosis and vaccine for the disease, Channel NewsAsia reports.
The Hong Kong researchers say they've found two forms of the virus after doing genetic sequencing on virus samples taken from 11 SARS patients. That indicates the SARS virus is undergoing rapid evolution in infected people in Hong Kong, a researcher said.
"This rapid evolution is like that of a murderer who is trying to change his fingerprints or even his appearance to try to escape detection," Dr. Dennis Lo, a chemical pathologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told Channel NewsAsia.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has removed the United States and Britain from the list of countries affected by the SARS virus, the organization said Friday, the AP reports.
"Affected" areas are countries where the virus has spread within local communities in the last 20 days; that's double the incubation period for SARS.
Dr. David Heymann, the WHO's chief of communicable diseases, said that in the United States, all the current SARS cases were imported from other countries and those people have not spread it to anyone else in the local community in the past 20 days.
The germ has killed at least 449 people worldwide, and sickened more than 6,300.
More information
For more information on SARS, visit the World Health
Organization or the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
