Health departments throughout China stepped up measures to combat the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) on Sunday, a day after authorities announced the nation’s first suspected case of the disease since July.
The capital, Beijing, which was hard-hit by Sars earlier this year, ordered airport and railway stations to tighten health checks on travellers and to send anyone with a high fever to a government-designated hospital, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Shanghai has been placed on ”high alert”, Xinhua said, without providing details.
The patient who is suspected of having Sars was in stable condition on Sunday at a hospital in the southern city of Guangzhou, a government official said.
”It will take several days to make the final diagnosis,” said the official from the anti-Sars office for Guangdong province, of which Guangzhou is the capital. The official gave only his family name, Wei.
He said it wasn’t clear if the patient’s family or friends would have to be quarantined.
The patient, a 32-year-old television station employee, checked into a hospital in Guangzhou on December 20 with a headache and fever, Xinhua has reported. It said the man was transferred on Wednesday to a quarantine ward and declared a suspected Sars case on Friday.
China’s Ministry of Health has sent a team to Guangzhou to deal with the suspected Sars case, Xinhua said.
Guangdong province was where the world’s first known Sars case was recorded in November 2002.
The pneumonia-like viral disease has sickened nearly 8 100 people worldwide, including 774 who died, according to the World Health Organisation. Most of the cases happened late last winter and spring. Sars killed 349 people on China’s mainland and sickened more than 5 000.
The government said in July the mainland’s last 12 patients had been declared free of the disease.
World Health Organisation officials have recently warned of a possible resurgence of the disease with the onset of winter weather and appealed for foreign aid to help China improve its disease warning and research. — Sapa-AP