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The World Health Organization said it was closing in on a previously unknown..

The World Health Organization continues to send supplies and equipment for isolating patients to Hanoi and other areas where these items are in short supply, [David Heymann] and [Mark Salter] said. The health agency has a significant amount of information, Salter said, 'that no risk to health workers has occurred when they take sensible standard respiratory precautions such as wearing masks, gowns, gloves and goggles in caring for patients in isolation rooms.' The illness causes severe breathing difficulty, forcing some patients to be connected to mechanical ventilators and requiring other time consuming work by hospital staff, Heymann said

As of yesterday the W.H.O. said it had received reports of 350 SARS cases, including 10 deaths since Feb. 1. Cases have occurred in: Britain (2), Canada (9), Germany (1), Hong Kong (203), Italy (1), Ireland (1), Singapore (39), Slovenia (1), Spain (1), Switzerland (7), Taiwan (6), Thailand (4), United States (13) and Vietnam (2). The Centers for Disease Control is also working with health officials in Hong Kong to determine whether two other patients might have acquired SARS while staying at the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon. Hong Kong officials are investigating whether a mainland Chinese professor who stayed on the ninth floor of the hotel passed SARS on to individuals who became the initial cases in Hong Kong. Then one laboratory was able to develop the crude test, known as an immunofluorescence test. In the small-scale study that followed, the laboratory took blood from four ill SARS patients and from four healthy people, as scientific controls, and tested the eight specimens without knowing the identity of any. The test was positive in all four who had SARS and negative for the four healthy people

The organization, a unit of the United Nations, expressed hope that scientists could quickly improve the test so it could detect the illness, called SARS for severe acute respiratory syndrome, at earlier stages. Dr. Klaus Stoehr, virologist and epidemiologist heading the scientific investigation for the health agency, called development of the crude test a 'real ray of sunshine' because of its potential use in slowing transmission of SARS. Stoehr and other experts cautioned that independent laboratories must repeat the test to verify the findings. Such work is expected to begin this weekend, and more work is needed to identify the cause of SARS, Stoehr said

The care of many patients with a mysterious respiratory illness is being seriously jeopardized because nurses and other health care workers are staying at home and refusing to treat them, officials at the World Health Organization said Thursday. Some hospitals in Vietnam and Hong Kong are operating with half the usual staff, the officials said. They expressed concern in interviews that the number of cases and of deaths may increase because standard nursing and infection control measures appear to be the most effective therapy for the disease, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Sustained, close contact is required to spread the disease through respiratory droplets, they said

Dr. [Salter] said that W.H.O. has ''a significant amount of information that no risk to health workers has occurred when they take sensible standard respiratory precautions such as wearing masks, gowns, gloves and goggles in caring for patients in isolation rooms.'' Referring to the death rate, which is about 3 percent, Dr. [David L. Heymann] said, ''It's not AIDS.'' But while the death rate is low, the illness causes severe breathing difficulty, forcing some patients to be connected to mechanical ventilators and requiring other time consuming work by hospital staff, Dr. Heymann said. Workers hosing down an area near the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, where a mysterious illness called severe acute respiratory syndrome is believed to have been started by a sick doctor who had visited China. (Agence France-Presse)

Local circuits in the spinal cord that generate locomotion are termed central pattern generators (CPGs). These provide coordinated bilateral control over the normal limb alternation that underlies walking. The molecules that organize the mammalian CPG are unknown. Isolated spinal cords from mice lacking either the EphA4 receptor or its ligand ephrinB3 have lost left-right limb alternation and instead exhibit synchrony. We identified EphA4-positive neurons as an excitatory component of the locomotor CPG. Our study shows that dramatic locomotor changes can occur as a consequence of local genetic rewiring and identifies genes required for the development of normal locomotor behavior.

Scientists have found clues that a virus might be the cause of the mysterious respiratory illness that has affected hundreds of people in Asia and other countries, the World Health Organization said. But the agency cautioned Tuesday that more work needed to be done to be sure that a virus is the cause of the illness and not a coincidental finding in a few patients. Using electron microscopes, two laboratories in Germany and a third in Hong Kong reported finding particles that seem to belong to a large family of viruses, paramyxoviridae, that includes those that cause croup, measles, mumps, respiratory disease, rubella and other ailments. Still, Dr. Klaus Stoehr, a virologist and epidemiologist who is leading the health organization's scientific team investigating the illness, said that none of those viruses had caused a disease like the one under investigation, which doctors are calling severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Instead, the findings suggest that the virus might be a hitherto unknown member of the paramyxoviridae family. Tests seem to have ruled out two recently discovered members of the family, the Nipah virus and the Hendra virus, Stoehr said. Dr. James Hughes, the director of center for infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, urged the public not to draw conclusions from the findings. Federal health officials were not yet ready to accept the paramyxoviridiae as the final explanation, he said. The three laboratories are part of a network of 11 in nine countries that the World Health Organization has created to find the cause of the ailment, which it has declared 'a worldwide health threat.' On Tuesday, other scientists in the network were testing throat swabs and sputum specimens from other SARS cases to see if they, too, could identify similar particles, Stoehr said

Much more work needs to be done to be sure that the suspect virus is the true cause of the ailment that W.H.O. calls SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome. The agency has declared the condition a ''worldwide health threat.'' On Tuesday, scientists from laboratories in Hong Kong and Germany reported having found particles that seem to belong to a large family of viruses, paramyxoviridae, in three patients with suspect SARS cases. The family includes the viruses that cause croup, respiratory disease, measles, mumps, rubella and a number of diseases in animals, including Newcastle disease, which is lethal to chickens; canine distemper virus and rinderpest, which affects cattle and other animals. Dr. [Larissa Kolesnikova] said she had peered into an electron microscope at the doctor's specimens for three hours on Saturday, then came back and identified the particles on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, scientists at the Chinese University in Hong Kong were identifying similar particles, also using an electron microscope. ''With the confirmation from Hong Kong, we are more confident'' that the virus might be the cause of the outbreak, said Dr. Hans-Dietrech Klenk, the director of the Marburg institute