With a major national holiday days away, the Chinese government yesterday exhorted people in a southern province where SARS has resurfaced to "take immediate action" to prevent the virus from spreading anew.
The upcoming May Day holiday is a time when millions of Chinese travel within their borders on vacation. Many stream to Huangshan, a popular scenic mountain resort in Anhui, the province where one confirmed SARS case and one suspected death from the disease were reported Friday.
That got the attention of the province's Tourism Administration, which issued what it called an "emergency circular" yesterday. The Xinhua News Agency said it called for "immediate action to prevent the spread of SARS," and provincial tourism offices were ordered to stay open "around the clock."
Beijing, China's capital, also reported one confirmed and one suspected case last week.
As it cautioned against panic, the World Health Organization agreed to dispatch a team of experts to help investigate links between a SARS research lab in Beijing and the SARS reported last week -- two of which involved lab workers.
"WHO sees the current situation in China as one requiring heightened vigilance, but still not one of a significant threat to public health," Dr. Julie Hall, WHO's SARS team leader in China, said in a statement Saturday night.
The two workers became sick at the research lab in the Chinese capital, WHO said. And in what could be the world's first SARS death this year, one worker's mother died last week in Anhui. Though Chinese authorities said she had a heart condition, WHO said she had "clinical symptoms ... compatible with SARS."
The daughter, a 26-year-old medical student surnamed Song, worked at the lab -- the virus control institute at China's Centers for Disease Control -- and is believed to have infected her mother after returning to Anhui.
Song was confirmed to have SARS and was treated last month at a Beijing hospital, where she came into contact with the 20-year-old nurse, who is also now a confirmed SARS case, the ministry said. A 31-year-old Beijing man who worked at the lab has been listed as a suspected case.
Song "has been recovering" and her temperature was normal yesterday, Xinhua said. It said her other vital signs, including breathing, have been improving.
The lab has been sealed off. Several hundred of its employees and people with whom the patients came into contact were quarantined in a hotel in Beijing's outskirts, state media said.
More than 300 people who came into contact with the cases in Beijing and Anhui have been quarantined. The WHO team may also travel to Anhui.
"The transmission we've seen so far has been happening with ... people who have been in close contact with people who probably have SARS," WHO spokesman Bob Dietz said yesterday in an interview.
"When we start to see `effective transmission' -- spread through the general public through normal contact, not intense personal contact -- that's when we feel we've reached another stage," Dietz said. "We haven't reached that stage. If it comes, we really are in something much more reminiscent of last year."
China is particularly sensitive to any outbreaks that coincide with economically pivotal national holidays, when millions of citizens travel by train, plane and car -- and create a potential nightmare of disease vectors on the move.
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