SARS fears grow in China

BEIJING -- Hong Kong lawmakers warned that hospitals may buckle from the volume of new cases of a mysterious flu-like illness as World Health Organization investigators hunted for clues into its cause amid a rising death toll, Sunday.\nChinese health authorities said six more people, including a 53-year-old Finnish man, have died since Wednesday, raising China's death toll to 52.\nIn Hong Kong, where 800 people are infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, officials reported Sunday 42 more cases and two more deaths, bringing its total number killed to 22.\n"If there's no change in the distribution of resources, and no contingency plans, most of the regional hospitals would not be able to provide normal services to patients," said Dr. Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert.\nBut Lo predicted the illness could be contained in two to three weeks by more quarantines and mandatory checkups.\nSARS has killed at least 98 people in Asia and Canada, and sickened 2,300 in more than a dozen countries. Symptoms include high fever, aches, dry cough and shortness of breath. No cure has been found.\nIn Singapore -- where SARS has sickened 103 people and killed six -- a doctor, 20 nurses and a midwife have begun showing symptoms, prompting fears it was spreading from hospital to hospital.\nThe doctor and nurses from Singapore General Hospital -- the city-state's largest -- have been isolated at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which has been devoted to treating SARS, Singapore General Hospital Medicine Division Chairman Philip Eng said.\nAuthorities have tracked more than 500 patients who came in contact with the midwife, who worked at KK Women's and Children's Hospital, but none has shown symptoms.\nExperts have linked SARS to a new form of coronavirus, other types of which usually are found in animals. But Chinese specialists say many who died had a rare airborne form of the virus chlamydia, usually transmitted through sexual contact.\nThe findings have raised questions as to whether SARS is caused by one virus or bacterium and made more lethal by another.\nWHO investigators in southern China's Guangdong province had a "very good meeting" on Sunday with officials of the provincial Center for Disease Control, said team spokesman Chris Powell. The WHO team planned to stay in Guangdong through Tuesday.\nTeam members earlier visited Zhongshan University in Guangdong's city of Guangzhou, where experts have hundreds of blood samples and other material from people with the disease.\nForty of China's 52 SARS deaths were in Guangdong. The first case was recorded in November. Since then more than 1,100 people in the province have been sickened by the disease.\nSunday, Chinese health officials announced the death of Pekka Aro, a Finnish man who showed symptoms after flying from Bangkok to Beijing. Aro was working for the International Labor Organization.\nThe quick announcement of his death came after complaints about the communist government's earlier reluctance to release information about SARS.\nWHO Director-General Gro Harlem Bruntland said Sunday that Chinese authorities should have been more open in the early stages of the disease.\nChina "took too long before they felt the need to be helped. We could have saved time by coming in earlier. But now I think there is full cooperation from China," Bruntland told reporters in New Delhi.\nCanadian authorities also announced Sunday that a ninth person has died from SARS and warned hospitals to treat anyone with a respiratory problem as a potential carrier.\nIn Hong Kong, a 45-year-old man locked himself in his apartment and refused treatment for the illness, holding police at bay for 14 hours before agreeing to go to a hospital on Sunday.\nIn Australia, a 2-year-old child recently arrived from Vietnam has been hospitalized with suspected symptoms, Bram Alexander from the Victorian Department of Human Services said Sunday.\nAnd while no SARS cases have been confirmed in South Asia, health officials were at airports across Pakistan and India to watch for suspected cases.