A suspected case of SARS in southern Guangdong Province was upgraded yesterday to a confirmed case, a senior provincial health official said.
"The case has been confirmed," Feng Shaoming, spokesman for the Guangdong Center for Disease Control, said. "Our experts at the Center for Disease Control have made many tests and they are all positive."
SARS triggered a worldwide health crisis after emerging in Guangdong in November last year, causing 774 deaths and more than 8,000 infections, the vast majority in Asia.
Feng said three experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) were in Guangdong's provincial capital of Guangzhou yesterday and were going over the test results.
He acknowledged that the case could not be officially upgraded to a confirmed case until the Ministry of Health made a formal announcement.
"So far the Ministry of Health has not announced it, nor has the World Health Organization. I don't know when they will, it is up to them, but our experts here have confirmed it."
In its daily SARS report yesterday, the ministry said no new suspected, clinically confirmed or confirmed cases of SARS had been reported nationwide from 10am Monday to 10am yesterday.
"According to reports from across the country at present there is only one suspected case of SARS and no clinically confirmed or confirmed cases," the ministry said.
Wang Maowu, director of disease control at the national-level Chinese Center for Disease Control, said an official statement was likely to be issued today.
Roy Wadia, the WHO's Beijing-based spokesman, said the WHO was trying to contact their ministry counterparts and reiterated that the WHO would be prudent in verifying the test results.
"We are trying to get confirmation with the Ministry of Health," Wadia said. "So far we have no official word ourselves."
China's health ministry announced Saturday the discovery of a suspected SARS case in a 32-year-old freelance journalist in Guangzhou, near where the virus was first detected in Foshan city on Nov. 16 last year.
Panyu city -- where the journalist, identified only as Luo, comes from -- is only 40km from Foshan.
None of the 42 people that came in close contact with Luo nor the 39 who had normal contact have developed fever or other abnormal reactions, the ministry said, adding that nine people have been removed from medical observation.
It said Luo was in stable condition and had had a normal temperature for seven consecutive days.
Luo developed a fever on Dec. 16 and was hospitalized with pneumonia in the right lung on Dec. 20.
Scientists suspect the SARS epidemic may have originated from wild animals sold for food in Guangdong's markets.
While both Taiwan and Singapore have reported SARS cases since the epidemic petered out in July, they were traced to laboratories where research had been conducted on the virus and not to the general population.
On Tuesday, the WHO team in Guangzhou met with the patient, Hong Kong radio reported.
After the meeting, WHO expert Augusto Pinto told reporters they would be carrying out detailed investigations on test results and estimated that it would take several days to review the data.
SARS symptoms are similar to other respiratory diseases with the onset of the disease only fully confirmed after a battery of tests are taken, including tests for SARS antibodies in the patient.
No vaccine is yet available.
China has issued health notices that include five levels of SARS diagnoses, among which are suspected cases, clinically confirmed cases and confirmed cases.
In the initial outbreak in late 2002 and early this year suspected SARS cases were routinely hospitalized and treated as full-blown cases due to the absence of a timely test for the disease, medical officials said.
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