The World Health Organization (WHO) is sending two safety experts to Singapore, where a new SARS case was believed to have started in a laboratory conducting research on the virus, officials said yesterday.
The laboratory safety experts, requested by the Singapore government, are to arrive in the island-state this weekend, the world health body said.
The discovery of the new infection, Singapore's first in four months, has rekindled concerns over SARS, a potentially deadly flu-like disease that primarily struck Asian countries earlier this year, seriously hurting tourism, airlines and related industries.
Singapore health authorities said on Tuesday that a 27-year-old Singaporean man has SARS but stressed it was an isolated case and that no further infections or any sign of an outbreak were detected.
"There is no person-to-person transmission, so there is no outbreak," Balaji Sadasivan, Singapore's minister of state for health, said on Wednesday on the sidelines of a regional WHO conference in Manila.
He said the man "most likely" was infected in a laboratory he visited that was conducting SARS research. The lab and another facility where the man was researching the West Nile Fever virus have been closed as a precaution.
"We will audit them and run through all the safety procedures in the laboratory," he said.
The WHO said Kazuyoshi Sugiyama of Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Antony James Della-Porta of the Biosecurity and Biocontainment International Consultants in Victoria, Australia, were being dispatched to Singapore.
Sadasivan said 25 people who had been in contact with the man diagnosed with SARS were quarantined and none appears to have the disease.
Hitoshi Oshitani, coordinator of the WHO's regional SARS response team, said the world health body is not issuing any new travel advisories.
SARS killed more than 900 people worldwide after it first emerged last November in China. More than 8,400 people were sickened before the WHO declared in June that the disease had been "stopped dead in its tracks."
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