- It was, as the Chinese might say, an astonishing case
of bad luck.
-
- Hong Kong health officials now suspect that some or all
of the people who picked up a mysterious pneumonia at the Metropole Hotel
on the Kowloon peninsula -- including a Toronto woman and a Vancouver man
-- spent a few unfortunate moments together waiting for an elevator in
the ninth-floor corridor on the afternoon of Feb. 21.
-
- Among them was a 64-year-old medical professor from Guangzhou,
capital of China's Guangdong Province. The professor, a physician who had
checked in that day, had been feeling poorly for a week before he left
the mainland. But he opted to make the trip to attend a relative's wedding
reception.
-
- "We think he must have been coughing and sneezing
while he was waiting for that lift," said John Tam, chief information
officer of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, "and that's when
he infected the other guests."
-
- By Feb. 22, the professor, who died on March 4, was so
ill he checked out of the hotel and into a hospital, contaminating within
24 hours enough of his fellow hotel guests to help spread the disease to
more than a dozen countries over the next three weeks.
-
- Yeoh Eng-kiong, Hong Kong's Secretary of Health, told
reporters yesterday that the infectious agent, believed to be an unknown
virus, travelled through respiratory droplets in the tight space of the
elevator waiting area and proved to be "very, very infectious."
-
- "It appears that when people are very sick, they
are infectious. So this is consistent with the picture we've seen that
it's really the health-care workers and family members that have looked
after very sick patients [who contract the disease]," said Dr. Yeoh,
"because it's probably when they're very sick they shed a lot of virus."
-
- Hong Kong health officials are now working with the Guangdong
government to investigate the source of the infection. The disease has
killed six in Hong Kong, the latest fatality being a relative of the Guangzhou
professor, and sickened 173 people, including five schoolchildren.
-
- The World Health Organization hopes to send a team to
the coastal province, where an unusual pneumonia outbreak that infected
more than 300 and killed five first began last November, Guangdong officials
recently confirmed. But until the hotel connection became apparent, the
current international cases of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome
-- now numbering a suspected 306 infections and at least 10 deaths worldwide,
two of them in Canada -- had only been traced as far back as Feb. 26.
-
- That day, a 48-year-old American businessman became the
SARS index patient, or the first person known to die of the disease, after
he stepped off a plane in Hanoi, feverish, coughing and struggling to breathe,
and went to a hospital.
-
- But Hong Kong officials have now confirmed that the businessman,
who spent time in Hong Kong before landing in Hanoi, was also a guest on
the ninth floor of the three-star Metropole Hotel at the same time as the
Guangdong professor. The man was eventually transferred back to a Hong
Kong hospital where he died March 13.
-
- Other guests at the hotel during the professor's brief
stay who later fell ill included three young women from Singapore, a local
Hong Kong resident who visited a friend at the hotel, a 55-year-old Vancouver
man and the 78-year-old Toronto woman who died at home March 5.
-
- "The story of this hotel is incredible," said
Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. "My
basic contention is that none of this would be happening in Canada if they
didn't all end up at the Metropole on those days."
-
- In fact, Dr. Low said, the Toronto woman and her husband
were actually checking out of the hotel on the afternoon of Feb. 21, just
as the Guangdong doctor was checking in.
-
- After spending the night with their son in Hong Kong,
the Toronto couple returned to Canada on Feb. 23, where the disease would
devastate their family. The woman's son died March 13 and her husband,
daughter and other son would end up in intensive care. Her five-month-old
grandchild is now fatherless and is being monitored at Toronto's Hospital
for Sick Children.
-
- The Vancouver man, who remains in critical condition,
and his wife had stayed at the hotel between Feb. 20 and Feb. 24.
-
- © 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
-
- http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNe
- ws/TPStory/LAC/20030321/UBUGGN/TPHealth/
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Frances
- 3-26-3
-
- So, unless the elevators take an EXTREMELY long time
to come in Hong Kong,
- this BS we've been hearing about having to be in contact
with someone
- who has it for AT LEAST 45 MINUTES in order to contract
SARS is nothing
- BUT BS!
|
