GENEVA, April 16: The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed on Wednesday that the outbreak of a new deadly respiratory disease, SARS, is caused by the coronavirus, a virus family which causes the common cold.
The confirmation came at a meeting of top researchers from 13 laboratories around the world at WHO headquarters in Geneva, the organisation’s chief researcher on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Klaus Stohr, told journalists.
“These colleagues have come to consensus agreement that we can now say that the disease called SARS first reported on March 12 is being caused by the coronavirus,” Stohr said.
The confirmation came after a laboratory at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University in the Netherlands managed to fulfil four key conditions to identify the virus in testing with animals, known as the “Koch postulates”.
However, it would take “months to years” to develop a full treatment, James Leduc of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) warned.
CHINA: WHO revealed on Wednesday the scale of the SARS epidemic in China was far worse than previously admitted, as the virus killed at least eight more people.
Five deaths from atypical pneumonia, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, were announced in Hong Kong where the respiratory illness has killed 29 people in the past five days alone.
Two deaths were also revealed in Singapore and one more in China, bringing the total confirmed global death toll from the virus to 160.
However the real toll could be far higher after the WHO implicitly accused the Chinese authorities of covering up the epidemic in the capital Beijing, thereby casting doubt on all the official Chinese SARS figures.
Since being criticised for not coming clean about the virus when it first emerged in the southern province of Guangdong in November, China has repeatedly insisted the epidemic was under control and belatedly started making public SARS statistics.
But the WHO said in Beijing alone there were now thought to be several hundred cases, compared to the official figure of 40, and that over 1,000 people were in hospitals in the capital under observation for SARS.—AFP
