Faculty Bibliography

Feces from a very high proportion of civets have tested positive for a virus that appears to be genetically similar to the coronavirus that has been linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome in people. A low proportion of animals from other species have also tested positive, Yuen said. The virus could have been transmitted from one species of animals to the others in the markets, WHO said. Civets are grown on farms in Guangdong province and are sometimes trapped in the wild for Chinese kitchens. The animals are becoming increasingly rare across their range, from Pakistan to Indonesia, because of deforestation, and their sale is banned in Hong Kong, where they are a protected species. Yuen added that it remains possible the virus occurs in other species as well, and the virus might even be capable of infecting household cats, which could make disease control more difficult

Dr. [Klaus Stohr] said in an interview that the agency ''believes that it is still possible to contain SARS if the person-to-person transmission of the virus is stopped'' in affected areas. Dispersal of droplets of the SARS virus in coughs and sneezes is thought to be the primary means of spreading SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The human SARS virus contains more than 29,000 nucleotides -- units of the genetic map -- 29 fewer than those found in the SARS viruses isolated from the animals. Though the number may seem trivial, even smaller differences in molecular maps can have major effects on viruses. One example is the influenza virus. The possibility exists that the SARS virus mutated if it jumped species, from animals to humans, Dr. Stohr said. But, he also said, ''what this means for SARS is unclear.'' The scientists also conducted laboratory experiments aimed at supporting the link between the animal and human SARS viruses. They did so by adding serum from the implicated animals that contained protective antibodies to test tubes containing the human SARS virus. The antibody-rich serum inhibited the growth of the human virus

China, meanwhile, has arrested a man accused of deliberately spreading the SARS virus and he could be executed if convicted, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing a report from the Xinhua news agency. The man, Liu Baocheng, who has recovered from SARS, was arrested as he left a hospital in the province of Henan in central China. Liu, a migrant worker, escaped from a hospital twice while he was being treated for SARS. He was caught by the police, who returned him to the hospital. On Wednesday, the world health body expanded its travel advisory to include the entire island of Taiwan. Earlier, the agency had advised people with non-essential business not to travel to Taiwan's capital, Taipei. The Center for Disease Control in Taiwan announced on Thursday morning that there were 65 more probable cases of SARS on the island, raising the total to 483. The increase came as officials were trying to move faster in classifying cases as probable, after criticism from some doctors that cases were kept too long as merely suspected

If Dr. [Chesley L. Richards Jr.] does have SARS, it could deal Taiwan another blow in its outbreak. He attended a meeting on Monday morning in the ''control room'' at Taiwan's Center for Disease Control with the top Taiwanese health officials leading their country's battle against the epidemic. Although Dr. Richards was in meetings at Taiwan's Center for Disease Control command center, people at the meetings did nothing because he did not seem sick, said Dr. Steve Kuo, the new director of coordination for Taiwan's SARS committee. Dr. [Julie L. Gerberding] said that the possibility that an expert in hospital infection control might have been infected in a hospital underlined the difficulty of protecting against the SARS virus. The C.D.C. was invited to Canada to consult when Canadian hospitals had a similar problem. Dr. Richards could have been infected elsewhere in Taiwan, but the hospital was the ''leading hypothesis,'' she said

An American doctor advising Taiwan on fighting its SARS epidemic has come down with symptoms of the respiratory disease and will be flown home by air ambulance with three of his healthy colleagues, the governments of both countries said on Thursday. It's not certain the doctor, Chesley Richards Jr., 42, an epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has SARS. Richards didn't treat patients in Taiwan, but visited wards where patients were isolated, wearing a respirator, to see whether Taiwanese hospitals were doing everything correctly to prevent new intra-hospital infections

In addressing delegates from the W.H.O.'s 192 member countries at their annual meeting, Dr. [Jong-Wook Lee] said he would seek $200 million from donor countries to provide the staff and the training needed to improve disease monitoring. Ninety percent of the new funds would go to train more epidemiologists and develop field laboratories in poor countries, as well as to evaluate the global response to new diseases like SARS. China arrested a man accused of deliberately spreading the SARS virus and who could be executed if convicted, Reuters reported, citing a report from the Xinhua news agency. The man, Liu Baocheng, who recovered from SARS, was arrested as he left a hospital in Henan Province in central China. Mr. Liu, a migrant worker, escaped from a hospital twice while he was being treated for SARS. He was caught by the police, who returned him to the hospital. At the meeting yesterday, Dr. Lee paid tribute to Dr. Carlos Urbani, a W.H.O. physician who discovered and treated the earliest cases of SARS while working in Hanoi, Vietnam. Dr. Urbani died of SARS on March 29. His widow, Giuliana Chiorrini, was present at the meeting

The experience of carrying out measures to detect SARS and control the infection in areas with large numbers of cases shows that ''you can contain'' SARS, Dr. [Henk Bekedam] told reporters by telephone from Geneva where the W.H.O. is holding its annual meeting. Tommy G. Thompson, the United States secretary of health and human services, seemed to take the view that SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, was endemic when he told reporters in Brussels earlier in the day that he believed that SARS would probably reappear and cause deaths in the United States and Europe in the fall. Dr. Bekedam said the W.H.O. and Chinese officials were making a major effort to determine the original source of the SARS virus in nature. If SARS jumped species, health officials need to find the source so they can develop strategies to deal with such animal reservoirs to prevent similar introductions in the future, he said

Tommy Thompson, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, seemed to take the view that SARS was endemic when he told reporters in Brussels earlier in the day that he believed SARS would probably reappear and cause deaths in the United States and Europe in the fall

The rejections have been based on the rivalry between China and Taiwan dating to 1949 when the two split amid civil war. China considers Taiwan a rebel province. Taiwan has sought observer status at the World Health Organization. As an observer, Taiwan would not be allowed to vote but could attend agency meetings, and its sovereignty would be implied. The United Nations has long taken the position that only China is a member. This year Taiwan is battling an epidemic of SARS. The United States said that it supported Taiwan's bid because it would help it contain SARS. In March, shortly after the World Health Organization issued a global alert about the threat of SARS, it asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work with Taiwan on the SARS epidemic, [David Heymann] said

Did the SARS virus jump species from an exotic animal in a food market in China to infect a human and start a chain of transmission that has gone on for seven months? If SARS is an animal virus, did it mutate to cause a new human virus? As is standard in investigating a new disease, scientists deliberately infected animals with the SARS virus in one avenue of research. Experiments performed on primates in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, helped convince scientists that the new coronavirus was the cause of SARS. And experiments by scientists in Canada have shown that pigs and chickens are not vulnerable to SARS. Finding the SARS virus in an animal would still not tell scientists how the first person became infected with SARS, and health officials would have to determine whether the virus from animals was continuing to fuel the human epidemic. So far, the W.H.O. says, human coughs have clearly been the principal means that humans have spread SARS around the world