GUANGZHOU, China (AFP) - World Health Organisation experts searched
animal markets for clues to explain the re-emergence of SARS (news -
web sites) as hundreds of raccoon dogs were killed in the latest cull
linked to the virus.

The authorities in the southern province of Guangdong have reported
one confirmed and two suspected cases of SARS, the first time the
virus has emerged in China since the country was declared SARS-free by
the WHO in June.

The WHO is still awaiting laboratory results that could confirm the
two suspect cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, but the lack
of causal links among the patients is confounding the experts.

"There is certainly no smoking gun at the moment with any of the three
cases that would enable us to say precisely where they got it," WHO
team leader Dr Robert Breiman said Wednesday in the southern city of
Guangzhou.

"It's still a little bit of a mystery, a bit of what you might call a
jigsaw puzzle and at some point I have a feeling this will all come
together and maybe be fairly obvious, but at the moment it's not
clear."

A 20-year-old waitress and 35-year-old businessman remain suspected
SARS patients in a southern Guangzhou city hospital and are in a
stable condition, the Chinese Health Ministry said in its daily report
Wednesday.

A 32-year-old man identified as China's only confirmed case since last
year's deadly epidemic was released from hospital last week.

Chinese health professionals and the WHO agree that this year's cases
bear little resemblance to those from last year, when SARS emerged in
Guangdong province and went on to kill nearly 800 people worldwide.

The China Youth Daily cited Guangzhou Respiratory Illness Research
Institute deputy director Xiao Zhenglun as making clear the current
instances were quite different from the cases last year.

"And also quite different from the cases that appeared in Taiwan and
Singapore this year," Xiao said, referring to the only other SARS
cases reported since the WHO declared the initial global outbreak over
last July.

The global health body said the intensity of the disease has
diminished, while the trasmission rate is so far nominal when compared
to the explosion of cases beginning in November 2002 in Guangdong.

"The severity of the sickness has been much less than last year," said
Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the WHO in Guangzhou.

Seeking the origin of the pneumonia-like disease, WHO experts returned
to the Xinyuan animal market Wednesday, one of the city's largest
suppliers of wildlife such as the civet cat, long suspected as a
possible source of SARS.

The WHO's environmental experts took samples from chicken, duck and
peacock coops.

"The WHO is hoping to get a wider sampling of the animal market,"
Wadia said. "It's like taking a control group so you can control tests
on the sample procedures."

Meanwhile, China's campaign to exterminate civet cats and rats in
Guangdong has extended to raccoon dogs and badgers.

Province-wide, 558 raccoon dogs and 10 badgers have been killed, and
the same fate has befallen 3,945 civet casts, the Guangzhou Daily
said. Most of them were drowned in disinfectant and then incinerated.

The WHO reiterated concerns that any such cull could be dangerous.

"If the animal does harbour the virus, then its even more of a
concern," said Wadia.

Amid complaints by animal dealers and restaurant owners that Guangdong
authorities have been too quick to take action, propaganda pamphlets
linking the virus found in the civet to that in SARS could be found
around the city's markets and restaurants.

The city government has banned the breeding, sale, distribution and
consumption of civet cat, raccoon dog and badger -- all of which are
popular delicacies in Guangdong.

PARIS (AFP) - China's hasty culling of civet cats to combat a feared
resurgence of SARS (news - web sites) is premature and potentially
misguided and may even be fingering an animal that is innocent,
experts said.

There are numerous other species, ranging from rats to domestic cats,
that can carry the SARS virus, they said.

But, they stressed, no-one yet knows how or even if any of these
species can transmit the virus to humans -- or indeed whether these
animals were infected by humans in the first place rather than the
other way round.

Officials fanned out across farms, wildlife markets and restaurants in
southern China's Guangdong province on Tuesday to round up caged
civets, a local culinary delicacy blamed for spreading Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) to humans in proximity.

All estimated 10,000 farmed civets are to be killed by January 10 -- a
death sentence pronounced after a half-year lull in China's SARS
cases.

But Dutch virologist Albert Osterhaus of the Erasmus Medical Centre in
Rotterdam said the weasel-like mammal, a cousin of the mongoose, was
only one among many theoretical animal vectors of SARS.

"The presence of the virus has been demonstrated in civet cats at
market places but also in raccoon dogs and badger ferrets, and there
are also a number of other species, such as domestic ferrets and cats,
which can be (experimentally) infected," Osterhaus told AFP.

"The virus is relatively promiscuous. It can infect many different
animal species, probably also including rodents, so taking all those
things together, the question really is whether the culprit is indeed
the civet cat."

Even though these species have been identified as being able to
harbour the virus, no-one knows whether they can transmit the agent to
humans, or indeed whether they were infected by humans in the first
place, Osterhaus said.

The pathway of transmission "is not clear at the moment," he said.

The civet cull was ordered in response to a single case of SARS,
involving a 32-year-old television journalist from Guangdong who has
since recovered. Scientists found civet cats had a coronavirus similar
to the SARS virus found in the patient.

Linda Saif, a professor at Ohio State University who is one of the
world's leading authorities on animal coronaviruses, said the Chinese
were clearly inspired by the mass slaughter of chickens in Hong Kong
in 1997 that stamped out the peril of "bird flu."

The difference was that this time around, hard virological data
pinpointing a specific animal risk are only sketchy, she said.

It was still unclear whether civets or other species can spread the
agent among humans, or if so, whether wild civets could pose a similar
threat, thus creating a viral "reservoir" that may never be
eliminated.

"At this point, I'm not sure you have all the information to begin
this major eradication campaign," she said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) diplomatically accused China on
Tuesday of rushing into the cull without conducting "a clear risk
assessment," notably whether the procedure could expose the
slaughterers themselves to infection.

"It is perfectly possible to assess these risks but as far as we are
aware that has not yet been done because this was a decision taken
rapidly in response to new information," WHO spokesman Iain Simpson
said in Geneva.

"(...) The problem is that all the focus on civet cats and the
slaughter of civet cats might divert attention from elsewhere," he
warned.

Sources said the civet campaign showed China was quick to show it
could be active rather than reactive to SARS and had woken up to the
threat, in lives and economic damage, that the disease could pose.

Its early attempt to cover up the first cases of SARS in Guangdong in
late 2002 was blamed for catastrophically spreading the novel disease
to Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Canada, France and elsewhere.

The outbreak claimed around 800 lives and infected 8,000 people before
it was stopped in the middle of 2003, using traditional methods of
quarantine and isolation in the absence of a cure or a vaccine.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A suspected SARS (news - web sites) patient in
southern China may have caught a new, mutated strain of the deadly
virus, a genetics expert researching the case said on Sunday.

Chinese media also speculated the patient, a 32-year-old television
producer, might have caught the virus from rats but this has not been
confirmed.

"It's definitely a coronavirus, but it's a different strain from the
virus last year," Chen Qiuxia of the Guangdong Center for Disease
Prevention and Control told Reuters. "Our gene testing showed the
difference."

Chen, ruling out the possibility of contamination in the laboratory
skewing the results, said the virus may be a mutation of the
coronavirus blamed for the SARS outbreak last year that infected about
8,000 people worldwide and killed almost 800.

The SARS virus belongs to the coronavirus family which also causes the
common cold in humans.

Most scientists say flu-like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which
first surfaced in southern China in November 2002, is likely to have
spread from farms in the region, possibly jumping to humans from
animals such as civet cats, ducks, pigs and rats.

A battery of lab tests on the television producer, China's first
suspected SARS case since the World Health Organization (news - web
sites) (WHO) declared the world SARS free in July, have been
inconclusive.

Roy Wadia, WHO spokesman in Beijing, declined to comment on the
possibility the man might have a new strain of SARS, saying the
organization had not yet examined Chen's study.

The Beijing Youth Daily, however, quoted an expert from a military
medical research institute cautioning that it was too early to say if
the man was infected with a mutated version of SARS, and further, more
comprehensive gene tests were necessary.

Last week, China reported that a viral gene sequencing test showed a
high correlation with the gene sequence of the coronavirus that causes
SARS.

The WHO has noted that tiny fragments of a virus gene similar to the
SARS pathogen have appeared in a small number of samples.

It says laboratories in Hong Kong running further tests might be able
to offer a definitive diagnosis this week.

Chinese media have reported that the patient had contact with rats
before he got sick and speculated there may be a link, but Chen said:
"So far we still cannot prove that it's related to rats."

The WHO's Wadia said the possible rat connection was something its
experts had noted, but it was too early to comment.

BEIJING (AFP) - The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS (news -
web sites)) virus returned to haunt China for the first time in six
months as a suspected case in southern Guangdong province was upgraded
to a confirmed case by senior health officials.

"The case has been confirmed," Feng Shaoming, spokesman for the
Guangdong Center for Disease Control, told AFP. "Our experts at the
Center for Disease Control have made many tests and they are all
positive."

SARS triggered a worldwide health crisis after emerging in Guangdong
in November last year, causing 774 deaths and more than 8,000
infections, the vast majority in Asia.

Feng said three experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) were
in Guangdong's provincial capital of Guangzhou Tuesday and were going
over the test results.

He acknowledged that the case could not be officially upgraded to a
confirmed case until the Ministry of Health made a formal
announcement.

"So far the Ministry of Health has not announced it, nor has the World
Health Organization (news - web sites) (WHO). I don't know when they
will, it is up to them, but our experts here have confirmed it."

In its daily SARS report Tuesday, the ministry said no new suspected,
clinically confirmed or confirmed cases of SARS had been reported
nationwide from 10 am Monday to 10 am Tuesday.

"According to reports from across the country at present there is only
one suspected case of SARS and no clinically confirmed or confirmed
cases," the ministry said.

Wang Maowu, director of disease control at the national-level Chinese
Centre for Disease Control, told AFP an official statement was likely
to be issued Wednesday.

Roy Wadia, WHO's Beijing-based spokesman said that the WHO was trying
to contact their ministry counterparts and reiterated that the WHO
would be prudent in verifying the test results.

"We are trying to get confirmation with the Ministry of Health," Wadia
said.

"So far we have no official word ourselves."

China's health ministry announced Saturday the discovery of a
suspected SARS case in a 32-year-old man in Guangzhou, near where the
virus was first detected in Foshan city on November 16 last year.

Panyu city, where the freelance journalist, identified only as Luo,
comes from is barely 40 kilometres (24.8 miles) from Foshan.

None of the 42 people that came in close contact with Luo nor the 39
who had normal contact have developed fever or other abnormal
reactions, the ministry said, adding that nine people have been
removed from medical observation.

It said Luo was in a stable condition and had had a normal temperature
for seven consuective days.

Luo developed a fever on December 16 and was hospitalized with
pneumonia in the right lung on December 20.

Scientists suspect the SARS epidemic may have originated from wild
animals sold for food in Guangdong's markets.

While both Singapore and Taiwan have reported SARS cases since the
epidemic petered out in July, they were traced to laboratories where
research had been conducted on the virus and not to the general
population.

On Tuesday, the WHO team in Guangzhou met with the patient, Hong Kong
radio reported.

After the meeting, WHO expert Augusto Pinto told reporters they would
be carrying out detailed investigations on test results and estimated
that it would take several days to review the data.

SARS symptoms are similar to other respiratory diseases with the onset
of the disease only fully confirmed after a battery of tests are
taken, including tests for SARS antibodies in the patient.

No vaccine is yet available.

China has issued health notices that include five-levels of SARS
diagnoses among which are suspected cases, clinically confirmed cases
and confirmed cases.

In the initial outbreak in late 2002 and early this year suspected
SARS cases were routinely hospitalized and treated as full blown cases
due to the absence of a timely test for the disease, medical officials
told AFP.

In retrospect, an untold number of people contracted SARS after being
hospitalized with other SARS patients, while in Taiwan nearly 100
fatalities first attributed to SARS were later rediagnosed as non-SARS
related.

China was the country worst affected by the SARS epidemic, infecting
5,327 people nationwide and killing 349.

The disease spilled into neighboring Hong Kong where 299 died as it
spread globally, devastating economies across Asia with travel and
tourism sectors losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sun Dec 21, 6:05 PM ET

BEIJING (AFP) - A restaurant in southern China's Guangdong province is
doing a brisk business in rat dishes, ignoring all warnings to stop
serving wildlife to prevent the spread of SARS (news - web sites),
state media said.

The eatery, in the city of Zhuhai, sells more than 100 rats a day, the
Xinxishibao or Information Times reported.

Some of the rats are caught in farm fields, while others are from the
mountains.

Southern Chinese believe rodents are safe to eat or turn into wine if
they are caught in countryside. However, regardless of whether they
are from rural or urban areas, they can transmit diseases, the report
quoted experts saying.

The outbreak of SARS in Guangdong last November did not discourage
local residents -- known for their taste for exotic dishes -- from
their eating habits.

Scientists from China and elsewhere found the Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS) virus in several types of wildlife, including rats,
and the government forbade vendors from selling wild animals,
especially endangered animals.

Officials also tried to discourage people from eating such creatures,
but the practice, part of Guangdong culture, continues.

Rats served by the restaurant can be as big as over 20 centimeters
(eight inches) long, the report said.

The restaurant skins the rodents by putting them in a pot of melted
asphalt, it said. Their skin comes off when the cooled asphalt is
peeled off them.

SARS infected almost 8,500 people and killed nearly 800 worldwide
before it was brought under control mid-year.

China was the epidemic's country of origin and also its main victim,
accounting for 349 fatalities and 5,327 infections, of which 193
deaths were in Beijing.

TAIPEI (AFP) - Taiwan's parliament has banned the selling of dog meat
in an effort to deter the slaughtering of strays, a lawmaker's aide
said.

The original law barred the killing of pets, including dogs and cats,
for their meat, skin (news - web sites) or other parts for financial
benefit.

But it failed to stop vendors from selling slaughtered dogs or to stop
restaurants from offering dog meat as a delicacy.

They were able to evade punishment by claiming that they did not kill
the animals themselves, said the aide to Wang Sing-nan, who proposed
the amendment.

"We hope by stopping the sale of dog meat, the killing will stop too,"
the aide said.

The amendment, passed Tuesday, also increased penalties for violators,
with the fine raised to a maximum of 250,000 Taiwan dollars (7,355 US
dollars), from 10,000 dollars.

Help-Save-A-Pet Fund in Taiwan, a non-profit organization advocating
animal rights, welcomed the bill and planned to offer small rewards to
those providing tips on dog meat sellers.

Secretary-general Liu Yu-tung said she hoped for a further law change
to ban the eating of dog meat altogether.