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WHO claims virus worldwide threat

Airports screened passengers for flu-like symptoms yesterday as worried travelers wore masks to ward off infection and one regional leader warned that Asia's mystery illness could escalate into a global pandemic like one more than 80 years ago that killed millions.

The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) said airline travelers could be spreading the atypical pneumonia that it has declared "a worldwide health threat" following nine deaths and hundreds of other cases.

Outbreaks of atypical pneumonia that hit southern China several months ago have been followed by similar cases in neighboring Asian nations, and most recently in Europe and North America.

Symptoms of the disease include fever, coughing, shortness of breath, headache, diarrhea and muscle stiffness, but physicians understand little about "severe acute respiratory syndrome," or SARS.

It was not clear whether cases -- including five deaths in China, one in Vietnam, one in Hong Kong and two in Canada -- are linked or caused by one disease type or several strains. No one is sure whether bacteria or a virus is at play.

With so few facts established, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said some officials inside WHO fear the possibility of an outbreak as "deadly as the 1918 influenza" pandemic that killed at least 20 million.

But a WHO official in Vietnam, where a nurse on Saturday became the ninth fatality, played down such worries.

"Today we don't know enough about the outbreak to be able to say that," WHO official Pascale Brudon said. Brudon added that 10 other patients with the illness in Hanoi, where at least 31 have been infected, were "getting better and better."

Nonetheless, authorities around Asia were taking precautions.

In China, a WHO official said the Chinese government has asked for help to investigate the malady.

Hank Bekedam, another WHO representative in Beijing, said the number of cases reported by the Chinese government is officially unchanged since mid-February -- 305 sick and five dead in southern China's Guangdong province, which is next-door to Hong Kong.

A Chinese Health Ministry report released by WHO said "antibiotics did not have an obvious effect" on patients in Guangdong province. But, the report said, "the patients are being cured one by one."

Alan Schnur, team leader of communicable-disease control for WHO in Beijing, called the mystery pneumonia in China "a new communicable disease" but emphasized that there was still no link to cases in other countries.

"We are dealing with a new communicable disease where we don't know the cause," Schnur said.

In Hong Kong, where one victim died last week in a hospital, pneumonia cases have almost doubled to 83. Cathay Pacific Airways ordered ground staff to turn away passengers who appeared sick.
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