Word: pneumonia
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DIED. HORST BUCHHOLZ, 69, German-born film star, best known to American audiences as one of the seven cowboys in the 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven and as a communist heartthrob in Billy Wilder's 1961 cold-war comedy One, Two, Three; of pneumonia; in Berlin...
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...