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Health Agencies Preparing Against SARS Return Exotic Market Yields a SARS Clue
ATLANTA (Reuters) - U.S. health agencies are testing drugs and taking
steps to protect the nation's blood supply to prepare for any re-emergence of SARS, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said on Friday. Thompson, who visited the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cited a possibility that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which killed more than 800 people this year, could reappear. "Although we cannot predict the likelihood of SARS re-emerging in the United States and elsewhere in the world, the seasonal reoccurrence of other respiratory diseases calls for all of us to be aware of the possibility that the reemergence of SARS could happen," Thompson said during a news briefing. Although it is not known whether SARS can be transmitted through blood, the FDA is also taking steps to safeguard the nation's blood supply, he said. SARS, which has sickened more than 8,000 people globally, came to health officials' attention earlier this year after a sudden outbreak of unexplained pneumonia affected people in China and other Asian countries. The World Health Organization declared a global outbreak of SARS over in July. CDC Director Julie Gerberding said that since SARS arose in Asia, "it's a good bet that would be the most likely place for it to emerge again." But she stressed a need for global preparedness to detect and respond quickly to a future outbreak. Thompson said the National Institutes of Health was developing vaccines and working with other health agencies to screen antiviral drugs to assess their effectiveness against SARS. "Some compounds have shown quite a bit of promise so far," he said. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...nm/sars_usa_dc By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter THURSDAY, Sept. 4 (HealthDayNews) -- It was just your typical live-animal food market in Shenzhen, China, with a palm civet here, a raccoon-dog there on display for the benefit of chefs, but it provided an important hint about the way an innocuous virus that lives peacefully in the human respiratory tract became the deadly virus SARS, researchers say. Swabs from two Himalayan palm civets, members of a cat-like family, turned up a coronavirus resembling one that is carried by many humans but does no harm, scientists at the University of Hong Kong report in the Sept. 5 issue of Science. The virus was also found in a raccoon-dog and a ferret badger from the same market, and in some employees at the market. Although the workers showed no signs of illness, the discovery "indicates a route of interspecies transmission" that created the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus, the report says. "The concept here is that we know that coronaviruses are mutable," says Dr. Philip Tierno, director of clinical microbiology and immunology at New York University Medical Center and author of The Secret Life of Germs.. "But it was not known previously that animal and human strains could recombine to become more profoundly infective that the human strains we knew in the past." The animal market was a logical place to look, the Hong Kong researchers explain, because the first cases of SARS, reported last November, occurred in restaurant workers from that region who handled wild mammals regarded as exotic foods. The Shenzhen market had a variety of species, held individually in small wire cages, that came from different regions of China. "The Chinese lay out animals in open markets and sell for food animals we wouldn't eat, and that cohort together," Tierno says. "You have humans working in close proximity with these animals. If an animal is slaughtered, viruses can spread from animal to human." Genetic analysis shows a family resemblance between the human and animal coronaviruses, the report says, although the human SARS virus is missing a large segment found in the animal virus. The discovery indicates that the open-air markets are places where SARS-like animal viruses can "amplify and transmit to new hosts, including humans, and this is critically important from the public health point of view," the researchers write. But it isn't clear that any of the virus-carrying animals in that market were the original source of the virus, they say. It is conceivable that they were all infected "from another, as yet unknown animal source, which is in fact the true reservoir in nature." Much more work in markets, in the wild and in laboratories "will help to better understand the animal reservoirs in nature and the inter-species events that led to the origin of the SARS outbreak," the researchers say. Meanwhile, a report by a panel of Central Intelligence Agency experts warns that while the SARS outbreak has been contained after infecting more than 8,400 people worldwide and causing about 815 deaths, the disease could re-emerge this winter, the time when respiratory diseases are most likely to spread. "SARS has not been eradicated," says a report prepared by the National Intelligence Council to CIA Director George G. Tenet. "We remain vulnerable." If the disease takes hold in Asian or African countries with inadequate health-care systems, it could cause more deaths than the first outbreak, the experts warn. A quick response to contain the disease is necessary because "currently, SARS has no vaccine, no effective treatment and no reliable point-of-care diagnostic test," they say. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it plans to have a better SARS surveillance system in place this year. More information Everything you need to know about SARS is available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control(http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars) and Prevention or the World Health Organization(http://www.who.int/csr/sars/en/index.html). Related Articles New research suggests SARS jumped from animals to humans in China(AFP): http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...s_030905123249 SARS Linked to Virus Found in Animals(AP): http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...e/sars_virus_2 Sars-like viruses found in China(BBC): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3081478.stm Scientists unveil 15-minute SARS test amid fears of epidemic's comeback: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...s_030905120736 |
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