PARIS, March 15: French health authorities have decided to send a special emergency mission to Hanoi where four doctors working at the private Hospital Francais de Hanoi have been severely stricken by a strange illness, which for the moment has been identified only as a “virulent form of pneumonia.”
The World Health Organisation has only been able to determine for the moment that disease seems to be an “atypical pneumonia” or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
The special mission is taking a specially-equipped aircraft to Hanoi to repatriate as many as possible of the 30 doctors and salaried personnel who work at the facility who have so far contracted the mysterious disease.
The malady that has been contracted is so mysterious that four French employees of the Hanoi hospital who have already returned to Paris - and do not appear to have contracted the disease — have been ordered by health authorities to stay home and, above all, stay out of the country’s mass transport system as the disease, if they have been contaminated, is considered as extremely contagious.
Agencies add:
WHO TRAVEL ADVISORY: Releasing a rare “emergency travel advisory”, the World Health Organisation said an ill passenger had been taken to an isolation unit in Frankfurt, Germany, on Saturday after being removed from a plane en route from New York to Singapore.
Some 155 other passengers who had been due to change planes or stay in Frankfurt were placed in quarantine there, while the remaining 85 passengers and 20 crew on the Singapore Airlines flight continued their journey, German officials said.
A spokesman for WHO said there were reports two people had died in Canada, taking the death toll to nine worldwide since the first outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia whose cause is not yet known, was detected in China in February.
“This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide health threat,” WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a statement.
Among the dead is an American businessman taken ill in Hanoi after visiting Shanghai. He died on Thursday in Hong Kong where 47 cases have been reported.
Some 40 people were being treated in Hanoi, where one nurse died on Saturday, according to local health officials. Cases have also been reported in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
Singapore health authorities reported another seven cases, bringing the total number of people reporting symptoms of the potentially fatal disease to 16 in the city-state. About 100 other cases have been reported in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Hanoi.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the passenger taken from the plane in Frankfurt was a Singapore doctor who had visited New York after treating some of the first suspected SARS patients in Singapore.
“If the suspicion (of pneumonia) is confirmed, the transit passengers will have to remain under observation in quarantine for seven days in order to diagnose any possible infection and prevent the disease spreading,” the Social Affairs Ministry in the state of Hesse, which includes Frankfurt, said in a statement.
CANADIAN CASES: Two members of a Toronto family died early this month from atypical pneumonia and four others — two from the same family and two in British Columbia — have been diagnosed with the disease, health officials said Saturday.
Ontario released a nationwide alert Friday to guard against the “outbreak of a potential communicable disease,” following a worldwide alert Wednesday by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
HIGH ATTACK RATE: WHO issued its first global alert for 10 years earlier this week because of the speed at which the disease travels and because patients are not responding to the usual treatments for pneumonia, Thompson said.
“As reports of cases are confirmed, you will see that there is a very high attack rate. When they get sick, they get very sick,” he said.
“We have been doing tests for weeks now in the world’s best laboratories and we still do not know whether it is a virus or bacteria,” the spokesman added.
Most of the latest cases have been among hospital workers.
The first outbreak was reported in February in China’s southern Guangdong province, where 305 people were infected and five people died.
Singapore and Taiwan have issued travel warnings after some cases followed trips to Hong Kong or mainland China.
It was after a visit to Hong Kong, where anxious locals have been sweeping surgical masks off pharmacy shelves, that a Canadian woman died of severe pneumonia on March 5. Her son, who did not travel with her, also fell sick and died.
In its alert, WHO said travellers and airline crews needed to be aware of the first symptoms, which include high temperature and difficulty in breathing. It was also likely that anybody taken ill would have been in contact with a person diagnosed with the disease or who had travelled to an area where cases had been reported, the alert said.
But WHO said it was not calling for restrictions in travel to any area.—Reuters