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Over the border in Malaysia, officials said 13 crew of a cruise ship which had sailed to Singapore and Thailand had been quarantined after one was identified as a "probable" SARS sufferer.
"We are facing an unprecedented situation. We are dealing with a serious, unseen threat." Singapore's minister of manpower Lee Boon Yang Singapore General Hospital, where 19 people, including staff, patients and visitors, have caught Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in a week, fears the virus could have spread to other wards.
Nine people have died of 133 confirmed cases in the tiny city state -- a rate of 6.7 percent, above the global average of about four percent. It has the world's fourth-highest number of cases.
"We are facing an unprecedented situation. We are dealing with a serious, unseen threat," Singapore's minister of manpower, Lee Boon Yang, said on Thursday.
He was speaking as governments around the world tightened their defences against SARS. Singapore has deployed surveillance cameras and the United States has broadened its definition of who is at risk.
Singapore General Hospital Medical Board chairman Tay Boon Keng listed the elderly Chinese man as a SARS "super spreader", and said he "fell through a crack" after being transferred from a hospital that handles SARS victims exclusively.
"There is concern that the virus could have spread to other wards," said a spokeswoman.
Of the 133 cases so far recorded in tropical Singapore, nine people have died in less than a month and 77 have recovered.
As authorities rang former hospital patients trying to trace anyone exposed to the super spreader, authorities were taking drastic steps.
Security officers fanned out across town to enforce quarantine orders that affect 490 residents, mounting Internet-linked "webcams" in homes and threatening to slap electronic wrist tags on offenders.
The disease has already delivered a heavy economic blow across Asia, hitting hotels, airlines, bars and restaurants, taxi companies, cruise tours and other tourist services.
The 26-year-old cruise ship crew member, an Indian national, was only the fourth person Malaysia has discovered to be suffering from SARS although 27 people are in hospital awaiting test results.
She was taken to hospital on Monday and was in "stable condition and recovering", Ismail Merican, Deputy Director-General of Health, told a news conference.
"Thirteen crew members of the ship have been quarantined on the ship at Port Klang," he said.
He did not say how many passengers had been on board or why none had been quarantined.
The ship began its cruise in Singapore, stopped in Port Klang, Malaysia, and visited the Thai island of Phuket. The official withheld the name of the cruise operator or the ship.
In Hong Kong, hospital workers said the epidemic had pushed the health care system to the brink of collapse.
Worldwide, more than 110 people have died and nearly 3,000 have been infected.
A quarter of Hong Kong's 1,000 cases of SARS, marked by fever, cough and severe pneumonia, are health workers, including 12 diagnosed with the illness on Thursday.
"I am afraid that if more hospital staff get infected, the entire health care system would collapse," Peter Wong, a spokesman for three major nurses' unions, said on Thursday.
He said Hong Kong government hospitals were not providing staff with adequate protective gear.
FLEEING THEIR HOMES
Hong Kong said three more people had died of SARS, bringing the toll to 30 and officials feared the illness could spread through the city's crowded apartment blocks.
Health workers at one block with confirmed cases sprayed down sidewalks and scrubbed entrances. They also distributed bleach to some residents, including one older woman who had wrapped herself in plastic and put a plastic bucket on her head.
World Health Organisation teams were in Beijing and in China's Guangdong province, the source of the infection, but WHO infectious disease chief Dr David Heymann said they would like permission to look further.
"China is a worrisome area because (we) don't know what is going on outside Beijing," he said in an interview.
The United States widened its definition of people at risk of SARS, saying anyone who passed through an airport in an affected country should watch for symptoms of respiratory illness and contact a doctor immediately if they developed fever or cough.
The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention believes its strict measures and broad definition of who is a suspected SARS patient has helped keep the disease from spreading in the United States where there are 166 suspected cases in 30 states.
CDC and European researchers both said they had come closer to proving that a new virus from the coronavirus family causes SARS. They found the virus, which may have jumped from animals to humans, in most patients with SARS.
The CDC has developed three tests for the virus and is working to get a licensed version that can be used widely, although this could take at least a week and probably longer.
Back in Asia, hot meals are off the menu for passengers on Taiwanese flights between Hong Kong and Taiwan as airlines step up efforts to stop the spread of SARS.
The commander of the 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea banned military and associated civilian staff from travelling to China and Hong Kong because of SARS, the U.S. military said.
In green and clean Singapore meanwhile, ministers are following Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong's lead and abandoning handshakes in public crowds or when holding meetings.
Instead they are adopting a traditional Thai bow with both hands clasped.
Hong Kong scientists have published the first hard and important evidence in this regard. The detection, medical virologist Dominic Dwyer of the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research at Sydney's Westmead Hospital has been quoted as saying by News24, will speed up the development of fast and accurate diagnostic tests, proven treatments and vaccines for the killer disease. Coronaviruses, it is being said, cause common colds and occasionally pneumonia. But they trigger severe illnesses in animals. They were found in samples from some patients with the deadly virus, but until now there has been no evidence they are widespread in people with SARS. In less than two months, the team, led by professors Malik Peiris and K.Y. Yuen of Hong Kong University, also identified the key symptoms and produced new guidelines on treating the disease which has hit 2671 people worldwide and killed 103. The research was considered so significant that the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, published it online late on Tuesday night and made it freely available at www.thelancet.com/.
Other viruses, like human-metapneumovirus, may still act as "opportunistic secondary invaders" which worsen the symptoms of SARS, the researchers have reported.
But at Hong Kong's Chinese University, however, researchers have not found a high incidence of the coronavirus among its SARS patients. "We have had metapneumovirus in a higher number." said Professor Peter Cameron. Professor Peiris claimed the Chinese University group had tested patients from fewer "clusters" of linked cases. In contrast, his team investigated 50 patients from five clusters -- using chest X-rays and blood and molecular tests -- and compared the results to a control group of people without SARS symptoms. Forty-five of the 50 people, aged from 23 to 74, had the coronavirus, but none of the control group. The major symptoms shared by SARS patients include high fever, muscle pain and a dry cough. All had serious respiratory illness which was not obvious without X-rays.
Copyright 2003 Dhamaka News
According to US sources, Pakistan had imported "full-fledged No Dong" 1,300-km range missiles even during the summer of last year bringing in the systems in US-supplied C-130 transport aircraft probably flying across Chinese territory, at a time when the military forces of Pakistan and India had been fully deployed on the borders with a high risk that a war could break out.
In fact, the US was strongly advocating restraint at that time, while Pakistan was holding forth nuclear threats to India along with the demonstration launch of the North Korean supplied Ghauri missiles.
The way these sanctions have been crafted, the US seems to have even given up any pretence that it intends to hold Pakistan to its international obligations. The US claims that the sanctions are meant to make it "clear that buying weapons from North Korea has a direct and negative impact on the security of the United States".
But these sanctions target the A Q Khan Nuclear Research Institute at Kahuta ã which is now projected as an entity "separate from the government" ã and not the government itself. This facility, which developed nuclear weapons clandestinely, could hardly be carrying out any commercial activity with the US which now stands barred.
On the other hand, if the US believes that A Q Khan facility is a non-government private entity, as its officials seem to have made out, the situation is even more bizarre. It¼s difficult to imagine this jihadi-culture dominated facility as a private enterprise!
The current sanctions have been conditioned by the desire not to punish Islamabad in any way since the later was seen as co-operating in the US war on terrorism! Obviously Washington ignores the fact that we were assured by it that Islamabad would stop terrorism from Pakistani soil and end infiltration across the borders into India.
Even on the issue of Pakistan-North Korea quid pro quo arrangements of missiles and nuclear weapons technology, it seems General Musharraf had assured the US government at the highest levels that there will be no such action in future. Past sins of proliferation are easily forgotten in Washington till a new violation is discovered and attracts the attention of policy-makers.
But the problem for our security is that the capability thus acquired, even if incrementally, remains with Pakistan, and requires that we factor this into our own defence policy. Washington must realise that its permissiveness has, in fact, both contributed to the intransigence of Pakistan, and impinged negatively on our security environment.
Copyright 2003 Dhamaka News
© 2003, GENERATOR 21.
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