Governments across Asia invoked emergency measures yesterday, including establishing quarantine camps in Hong Kong, to try to contain the spread of the deadly pneumonia-like illness that has killed 63 people in three continents and is stumping doctors trying to find a cure.
Officials in the former British territory said yesterday they would use colonial-era laws to fight the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic. This is to include the conversion of two holiday camps into holding centres for the 240 residents of a contaminated apartment building that was isolated three days ago.
Thailand announced that it has authorised the quarantining for a fortnight of anyone arriving in the territory with suspicious symptoms, Singapore started quarantining people on Monday — including two rugby teams returning from Hong Kong — as a precautionary measure.
Australia announced its first Sars case, an unnamed British man who arrived from Singapore. However, health authorities claimed he had recovered, had not infected anyone else and had already left the country.
Taiwan has banned shipping between the Chinese mainland, where Sars is thought to have originated last November, and its Matsu islands just off the Chinese coast, saying that the islands’ clinics could not handle an outbreak of the illness.
Indonesia’s health minister said yesterday doctors had detected three suspected Sars cases but the diagnoses had yet to be confirmed. Jakarta stepped up its precautions at airports over the weekend.
Officials in the German city of Dortmund said yesterday a 72-year-old man had been diagnosed with Sars after returning from East Asia, making him the fourth man in the country to have caught it.
World Health Organisation officials trying to find a cure said they had not yet been granted permission to visit Guangdong province in southern China to look for clues on how to treat the illness. The majority of the Sars deaths to date have been in the southern Chinese region.
A Chinese official denied that Beijing is trying to conceal anything. ”The Chinese government has not covered up. There is no need,” a foreign ministry representative, Liu Jianchao, said. ”We have nothing to hide.”
The WHO admitted yesterday that it is contemplating a blanket travel advisory against visiting Hong Kong and other affected countries in the Far East because of growing concerns that new cases appear unrelated to older ones.
The cancellation of numerous high-profile events around the region was also announced yesterday, including Tony Blair’s visit to Beijing scheduled for later this month, although Chinese officials said this was not linked to Sars. Downing Street declined to comment.
The World Economic Forum has indefinitely postponed a meeting scheduled for this month in Beijing while Asian Olympic chiefs are moving a meeting from Vietnam to Bangkok.
About 1 900 people have been affected in at least a dozen countries. The main symptoms are a dry cough, high fever and shortness of breath.
The main focus of attention remains Hong Kong and particularly Block E of the Amoy apartments in Kowloon. Investigators, wearing heavy protective clothing, continued to comb the site after the residents were evacuated to the two camps.
In a disturbing twist it was announced yesterday that many people in flats above or below those already infected in the 33-storey building had caught the disease. The illness had previously only spread from people who had been on the same floor of buildings.
Doctors, however, cautioned that it was too early to declare that Sars is an airborne plague and said it might have spread via the water pipes or the sewerage system.
Hong Kong residents were sparked into panic buying yesterday after a teenager started a hoax on a website, saying that the government had declared the whole territory ”an infected area”. Many are seeking refuge in traditional remedies to fight the epidemic. Chinese medicine sellers say sales of their products have soared in the last few days. – Guardian Unlimited Â