Crucial two days for Canada as SARS deaths climb to 30

News, May 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Crucial two days for Canada as SARS deaths climb to 30
(AFP), Khaleeej Times, 31 May 2003

TORONTO - Health officials in Canada on Saturday braced for a “nervous weekend” as they prepared to move people suffering from the deadly flu-like illness SARS to four specialised hospitals in a further bid to come to grips with the virus.

Canada -- the only country outside Asia to record deaths from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome -- reported its 30th victim on Friday, a 57-year-old man who died the day before. Ontario province health commissioner Colin D’Cunha also reported a rise in the number of cases -- 43 probable cases, up from 29 on Thursday and 12 on Wednesday.

Fifteen people had suspected cases of SARS and 150 more were being monitored as possible SARS victims, he said.

Officials said they expected the number of cases to continue to rise as they are now using the World Health Organization’s definition of SARS instead of the Canadian government’s more rigorous criteria. The authorities are set to transfer all SARS patients at present in several different hospitals to four specialised hospitals next week to create more centralized care.

“This is a nervous weekend for us because we have two things going on at once,” said Ontario’s public security commissioner James Young.

“We’re attempting to take this hospital care system and develop our SARS hospitals and our SARS clinics.

“We do that while facing the problem of continuing to see patients and patients who need to be sorted out as to whether they have SARS.

“We have, at the same time, health workers who are sick and health care workers who are in isolation and this truly is causing strain on the system,” he said.

Canada’s second SARS outbreak was reported last week, and more than 7,000 people, including some 440 health care workers and 1,500 people tied to an area high school, have since been put in preventive quarantine.

The outbreak is being traced to a 96-year-old man who died May 1 after mysteriously contracting the flu-like illness in a hospital ward where no SARS patients were located.

Officials think he may have contracted SARS from a mildly infected staff member or patient. Since his SARS diagnosis was post-mortem, transmission to other patients, workers and visitors went undetected for several weeks.

SARS first came to Toronto via an elderly woman who returned from Hong Kong in late February. Before her death, she infected her family, which in turn transmitted the disease to hospital workers, patients and visitors, by mid-March.

By early May, officials here thought the disease was contained, with the number of cases down to single digits, and the World Health Organization removing Canada from its list of SARS-affected countries. The discovery last week could not have come at a worse time: Toronto officials were gearing up to try to woo back visitors with a multi-million dollar promotional campaign to try to erase the stigma from its initial outbreak.

At the same time area hospitals had relaxed many precautionary measures in a move now regretted as premature.

Toronto was put back on the World Health Organization’s list of SARS-affected areas Monday. Canadian Health Minister Ann McLellan said Friday that despite the rising case numbers, “It is not getting worse.”

“This second cluster has probably peaked and we are on the way out of this,” she told CNN television. Young stressed a more cautious approach.

“We’ve indicated we’re not out of the woods yet. We’ve put measures in place. We’re watching very carefully this weekend and early next week will tell us how effective the first round of measures have been.

“There will be problems ... the question is how many and how big,” he said, lamenting “even when you gain control, it takes one case to start it back up again.”

US Centers for Disease Control officials arrived here Friday to help Toronto health experts get to the bottom of the second outbreak. All of Canada’s cases are in the Toronto area, except for two suspected cases in western British Columbia province.

Worldwide, there are more than 8,200 probable cases of SARS in some 30 countries and at least 750 SARS-linked deaths, according to the WHO

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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