- TORONTO (Reuters) - Toronto
may raise its number of probable SARS cases to 60 or 70, from 12, as it
reclassifies how it counts suspect cases in line with World Health Organization
recommendations, one of the doctors leading the fight against the respiratory
disease said on Thursday.
-
- "We're talking numbers up in the 60s, 70s,"
Dr. Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto,
told Reuters.
-
- Toronto has reported just 12 probable cases of Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome, some of them old cases and some part of a new
cluster that emerged last week. It was also examining more than 50 suspect
cases.
-
- But under a WHO definition Toronto will now include patients
with pneumonia where the cause cannot be adequately explained. The previous
Health Canada recommendation on how to define SARS included only patients
with a worsening respiratory disease.
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- "Health Canada's definition is fine when you are
looking back at an outbreak, but when you are in the middle of an outbreak,
the WHO definition is more practical," Low said.
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