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#1
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Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog meat
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. |
#2
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Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog meat
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. |
#3
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SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog meat
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. |
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SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog meat
Shipped Beef Adds To Industry Woes
Meat Sent Before Ban Is in Limbo By Margaret Webb Pressler Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 30, 2003; Page E01 The discovery of mad cow disease in this country, and the resulting trade ban on U.S. beef by many foreign countries, means that 2,200 container loads of beef already on the ocean headed for the Pacific Rim may have to turn around and make the two-week journey back home. The enormous amount of meat in high-tech frozen and cooled containers is among the top concerns of U.S. beef processors and represents what could be the biggest financial loss to the industry, according to industry officials. "At 42,000 pounds per container, it ends up being between 90 and 100 million pounds," said John N. Simons Jr., chief executive of Swift & Co., the nation's third-largest beef processor, which owns a significant share of the containers on the water. "If Japan and Korea end up not accepting that meat, it's about $300 million worth of product." Although mad cow disease could hurt Swift on several fronts, Simons called the product en route "the big bogey" for the nation's beef processors. Other major processors were either unavailable or more guarded in their comments than Simons. Countries that have banned imports of U.S. beef have not said whether they will accept shipments launched before the bans went into effect, so getting those products to their intended destinations is expected to be a major part of the negotiations underway between foreign and U.S. agriculture officials, Simons said. The Associated Press reported that Japan said it will not discuss reopening its borders to U.S. beef until more facts are known about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of a single Holstein dairy cow in Washington state infected with mad cow disease. Japan is the No. 1 export market for U.S. beef. "I don't know how they're going to make a decision on current shipments," said Gary Weber of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Tyson Foods Inc., the nation's largest beef processor, said it also has shipments en route and in ports abroad. "We're hopeful this product will be accepted since it was shipped before the governmental bans were put in place," said spokesman Gary Mickelson. Swift's containers are arriving every few days, and some already have been unloaded and put in storage, said Mark Gustafson, the company's senior vice president of international sales. "We probably have a 15- to 20-day window here to know what the status will be before we start freezing all the chilled beef and then start returning containers," he said. Meanwhile, arriving boatloads of beef could put Japan and other nations in a strong negotiating position to request both lower prices and the kinds of changes they've been wanting out of the U.S. beef market anyway, industry officials say, including more widespread testing for disease and elimination of the use of "downer" cows -- those that can't walk because of injury or disease. Swift eliminated the use of downer cattle two years ago, Simons said. The resolution of what happens to the en route shipments "will probably set a precedent for future trade," Simons said. So far 31 countries have put into effect total or partial bans on importing U.S. beef. Eight to 10 percent of U.S. beef is exported. It's not just trade issues that put the giant beef processors in the cross hairs of the mad cow impact. Falling beef prices domestically and uncertain consumer reaction are also major concerns for companies like Swift, which processes 7 million cattle a year. Credit-rating firm Moody's Investors Service said yesterday that it may cut the credit ratings for Tyson Foods, National Beef Packing Co. and Swift -- the nation's top three beef processors -- because of "the significant uncertainty surrounding future operating performance." Major fast-food chains, including McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's, all reported no change in sales and no shift in orders from burgers to chicken or salad. Pricier restaurants also reported that they experienced no drop-off in steak sales. In fact, beef orders increased at some, including Morton's Restaurant Group. Keeping that consumer demand is important to the big beef processors, because they are major suppliers to retailers and food service companies, which in turn supply restaurants. Panic in the population over the safety of U.S. beef would be an even bigger problem than 2,200 shipping containers in limbo. The other major problem is rapidly falling cattle prices. Eventually companies will be able to buy animals for less money, but now their stocks of meat, carcasses and live animals are likely to sell for less than in recent months. The price for live cattle was over $95 per 100 pounds before the announcement that mad cow had been discovered. How low will it go? "Everybody's guessing and has their finger in the air, but they think it's low to mid-70s," Simons said. On the Chicago Mercantile Exchange yesterday, the price of 100 pounds of cattle for February delivery fell $5 -- as much as the exchange would allow in a single day -- to $81.17. Staff writer Caroline E. Mayer contributed to this report. |
#5
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China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog meat
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. |
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China's rush to slaughter cats is flawed, experts warn China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of dog me
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. |
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China's rush to slaughter cats is flawed, experts warn China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SARS Taiwan parliament bans selling of do
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Bardot Blasts China for Killing Civet Cats China's rush to slaughter cats is flawed, experts warn China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk business in rats despite SA
By The Associated Press
PARIS - French actress Brigitte Bardot (news) has sent a letter to China's president criticizing the killing of civet cats in its fight against the SARS (news - web sites) virus. Bardot's letter to President Hu Jintao claims there's no scientific proof about which animal species first caught the severe acute respiratory syndrome and lashes out against China's "cruel and barbarous slaughtering methods." "The eradication methods these animals are put through are unacceptable," Bardot wrote in her letter, which was made available to reporters Thursday. The southern Chinese province of Guangdong has targeted 10,000 civets for slaughter — by drowning, electrocution or incineration — by Saturday as part of its battle against the spread of the virus. "Mr. President, I hope to believe that you will substitute these current slaughter methods for methods that are worthy of your legendary refinement," Bardot's letter said. The mass slaughter stems from the suspected link between wild animals and the virus, which killed 774 people worldwide last year. Health officials declared China's first SARS patient of the season, a 32-year-old TV producer from Guangzhou, had recovered on Tuesday after contracting the illness in mid-December. Researchers have found similarities between a virus found in the civet — a weasel-like animal prized as a delicacy — and in Guangzhou's SARS patient. Bardot, 69, is no stranger to using her celebrity for feisty campaigns to defend animals. In 1997 and 2000, she was convicted in France of inciting racial violence after she criticized in print the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep. 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. |
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Origin of China's SARS outbreak a mystery; raccoon dogs culled China's rush to slaughter cats is flawed, experts warn China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk busines
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. |
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Origin of China's SARS outbreak a mystery; raccoon dogs culled China's rush to slaughter cats is flawed, experts warn China Patient May Have New Strain of SARS SARS returns to haunt China Southern Chinese restaurant does brisk bus
"joe" wrote in message
... The Chinese people have abandoned morality and God to pursue a purely materialistic life style. Such practices are against the order of nature and the purpose of human life. We can all learn from the result of their actions. Not all Chinese people have abandoned morality and embraced pure materialism. Those who do so sometimes come back to reality after they have realised how damaging such an ideology is to themselves, their loved ones and the society they live in. I agree, that everyone can learn from the mistakes done in the past, the most important thing is to guard against doing the mistake over and over again. As long as we don't learn our lesson, we will forever be trapped in the cycle of ignorance and misery. |
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