Word: pneumonia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lucky ones, though the 55-year-old woman lying in her narrow metal bed in the pneumonia ward of Guangzhou's Nanfang Hospital doesn't look it. Ye Qitian's breath comes in ragged gasps, her gray-white hair is bedraggled, and she can only open her right eye halfway as she speaks to visitors. On a rainy afternoon last week, the Chinese housewife says she is recovering from what her doctors have identified as atypical pneumonia, a mysterious disease that has plagued southern China for months and is suspected to have erupted into the outside world in late February...
International health officials are being confronted by everyone's worst nightmare: a highly contagious, potentially fatal disease of unknown genetic makeup and for which there is currently no antidote or vaccine. By Saturday, when the sudden spread of a mysterious strain of "atypical" pneumonia called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to issue an emergency travel advisory for parts of Asia, hundreds of cases had been reported in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Singapore's Ministry of Health issued an urgent advisory warning its citizens to avoid travel to China...
...expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says, "There's no evidence of how this began or where it came from. We really have no idea what this is, no theories whatsoever." The outbreak may have started this winter when 305 people in Guangdong were infected with atypical pneumonia; five of them died. Then, early this month, an American businessman who'd traveled to Hanoi from Shanghai via Hong Kong was admitted to a Hanoi hospital with a similar affliction. His case sparked further concern when he was airlifted to Hong Kong and scores of health-care workers...
...working theory, says Dr. Tam, is that the illness is spread by airborne respiratory mucous and saliva droplets. In Hong Kong, where 47 patients were under observation for pneumonia by the end of last week, the Department of Health urged at-risk hospital workers to wear protective gloves, masks and gowns...
...Doctors see no connection between the atypical pneumonia and the avian flu that has plagued Hong Kong in recent years. Still, officials worry that the city could be stigmatized as an epidemiological hot zone. Last Friday, Hong Kong's Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong pleaded for calm. "Words like 'Hong Kong has been quarantined' are detrimental to Hong Kong," he said. But if the disease keeps spreading, figuring out the proper spin on an outbreak should be the least of anyone's concerns...