March 31, 2003	Monday	Muharram 27, 1424

HONG KONG: When visiting Chinese Professor Liu Jianlun was rushed into hospital in Hong Kong on February 22, medical staff might have been forgiven for thinking his high fever had made him delirious.

“Don’t touch me,” he shouted at medical staff. “I am carrying a very virulent virus.” His warning was later backed up by a telephone call from the hospital in Guangzhou, southern China, where the 64-year-old worked treating respiratory illnesses.

Staff there told Hong Kong’s Kwong Wah Hospital to put him in isolation. They did, and it was in an isolation ward that Dr Liu died days later of an aggressive form of atypical pneumonia now known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Crucially, however, the initial warnings about his condition appear to have gone no further than the double doors of the isolation ward, despite a Department of Health investigation into his case as early as February 24.

They definitely did not reach other guests who Dr Liu coughed and sneezed on while waiting for the lift on the ninth floor of Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel and in doing so started a chain of events that spread the virus around the world.

With no warning having been issued, the hotel guests he spread the virus to concluded their holidays and unwittingly carried the virus across Asia and to North America and Europe.

A previously unknown coronavirus is now being blamed for the worldwide spread of SARS. Coronaviruses are highly infectious and resistant viruses second only to rhinoviruses as a cause of the common cold, but cases rarely progress to pneumonia as happens with SARS.

All the evidence points to it originating in Guangdong, southern China, where officials now admit more than 30 people have died and nearly 800 people have been infected in an outbreak that began last November.

Experts now believe Dr Liu, an expert in respiratory diseases who treated pneumonia patients in Guangdong, was the single source for at least 500 of the cases outside China. The virus is still spreading.

Six days before arriving in Hong Kong, the doctor picked up the virus from a patient in the province. His decision to go ahead with his visit to Hong Kong despite his illness appears to have made the difference between the virus being contained in China — where officials are reluctant to admit any health crisis — and its extraordinary spread across the globe.

Two of the people believed to have stood near him outside the hotel lifts were elderly tourists from Canada. They were both infected, and one of them, a 78-year-old woman, died in hospital in Toronto after leaving the Metropole on March 2.

She infected five members of her family including her 44-year-old son who died in a Toronto hospital eight days after his mother.

Another hotel guest was an American-Chinese businessman from Shanghai who, soon after getting the virus from Professor Liu, flew to Hanoi where he was admitted to hospital two days later.

He spread the virus to the French Hanoi Hospital, later killing a doctor and nurse, before he himself was flown back to Hong Kong where he died in hospital on March 13. Another doctor at the hospital returned to France where he too succumbed to the infection.

Three of the other guests were young Singaporean women, all of whom were infected with the virus. They were hospitalized in Singapore after leaving the Metropole on February 25 and recovered, but not before passing the infection on to more than a dozen other medical staff and relatives.

Scientists say such a virus could circumnavigate the globe in hours today — and the only thing to keep it in check would be the relative progress of medicine and its ability to deal with such a deadly outbreak.—dpa