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Health official: SARS teaching world about outbreaks
TORONTO, Canada (CNN) -- The SARS outbreak is helping health authorities learn how to mount an appropriate response to emerging infections, Health Canada's Dr. Paul Gully said Thursday. Speaking at the conclusion of an international conference on severe acute respiratory syndrome, Gully said, "We must look at new and innovative ways to fight emerging diseases," adding that the SARS outbreak was "unprecedented" in the speed with which it spread. Ontario's Ministry of Health has reported 23 SARS-related deaths -- the latest two coming a day after the World Health Organization dropped its travel advisory to Toronto. WHO's executive director of communicable diseases said he believes the SARS outbreak has peaked in Toronto, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore, leaving only China with a large number of newly reported probable cases. (Full story) But Dr. David Heymann warned that SARS is "a global emergency" and "this will not be the last emerging infection." Health officials, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Dr. Julie Gerberding, came to Canada to try to develop strategies for stopping the spread of SARS in health care settings. After a number of health care workers became infected with SARS, airborne, droplet, and contact precautions were put in place, similar to those used to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, Gerberding said. Now experts realize there must be 100 percent compliance with those precautions to stem SARS' spread, she said. Isolating suspect casesMeanwhile, at WHO's headquarters in Geneva, officials Thursday recommended that patients who are suspected of having SARS and who test positive for the virus should be isolated in the same way as probable cases. In both probable and suspect cases, the patients have respiratory symptoms and fever. A case is deemed probable if the patient also has lung illness confirmed by an X-ray. The isolation recommendation is meant to reduce the possibility that a person who is shown to have the virus could pass it along to someone else even though the patient is only suspected of having SARS, said WHO scientist Dr. Klaus Stohr. Tests, when done by properly trained scientists in the appropriate laboratory, are now sophisticated enough to very reliably detect the presence of genetic material from the SARS virus, Stohr said. The CDC announced earlier this week that it was using lab tests to make better diagnoses of SARS. It said six of the 52 probable cases in the United States were laboratory-confirmed using the new criteria Although no U.S. deaths have been reported, 11 new probable SARS cases were counted from Tuesday through Wednesday, according to the CDC and WHO. The WHO reported a total of 5,865 probable cases with 391 deaths worldwide, as of Thursday.
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