Nearly 500 people were in quarantine in China's capital and Anhui Province yesterday as authorities raced to contain a small eruption of SARS before a national holiday puts millions of travelers on the road.
Two confirmed cases of SARS and six suspected ones have been announced over the past week, all of them linked to people who worked in a SARS lab in Beijing.
People in Beijing and in Anhui believed to have come in contact with those cases -- 337 in the capital and 133 in the province -- are under quarantine, according to the official newspaper China Daily. Government investigators also fanned out to examine labs that do SARS research, the newspaper said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was dispatching a team to find out how two workers could have become infected at the Beijing lab and then pass SARS to others. There were clearly "some sort of errors, mistakes" in laboratory security, the WHO's Western Pacific regional director, Shigeru Omi, told a news conference in Manila.
The May Day vacation beginning this weekend poses a dilemma for Chinese leaders. They fear that having so many travelers on the move could spread SARS again but also worry that canceling or curtailing the holiday could cause serious economic damage.
"SARS surveillance tightened ahead of Golden Week," the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily said.
At the border crossing with North Korea in the northern Chinese city of Dandong, truck drivers entering China stuck their heads out of windows into the rain yesterday so that screeners could check their temperatures with disposable thermometers.
The news provider Sina.com has sent subscribers to its mobile phone news-bulletin service a detailed itinerary of one confirmed SARS patient's recent travels, suggesting that travelers who may have come in contact with her seek medical evaluations.
Still, health officials prescribed calm. All of the suspected cases announced over the weekend have been traced back to a single patient, the government said, suggesting the problem was still tightly confined and not a general outbreak.
WHO said any transmissions so far have appeared to be from very close contact.
"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," Beijing-based WHO spokesman Bob Dietz said. "If it comes, we really are in something much more reminiscent of last year."
Omi also called for vigilance, noting that one confirmed case had traveled back and forth between Beijing and Anhui three times with a fever and that "many people have been exposed or potentially exposed."
He said China's situation needed "more attention" than other SARS cases that have occurred since last year -- two laboratory-acquired cases in Taiwan and Singapore and four cases in Guangdong. All of those patients recovered.
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