Researchers in Guangzhou have discovered that SARS weakened as it spread and the virus is less contagious than it was first thought.
This was disclosed by Wang Ming, vice director of Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Sunday at a seminar in Guangzhou. The seminar was attended by Chinese and Japanese medical experts.
The experts believed there would be no SARS epidemic this winter or next spring if individual SARS patients, if any, were isolated as quickly as possible.
Wang said Guangzhou researchers had found the SARS virus in first-generation patients were 100 percent contagious with a mortality rate of 45.5 percent while the figures for second-generation patients were 4.7 percent and 3.77 percent respectively.
Third-generation patients would not spread the virus and all of them would recover, the researchers said.
They also discovered only one public transmission case in Guangzhou. The bulk of SARS patients contracted the disease in hospitals, the experts said.
Guangzhou reported a total of 1,274 SARS patients but the number was corrected to 1,062 after it was discovered that some cases had been duplicated. Later follow-up research found only about 700 of these had contracted the SARS virus.
(Shenzhen Daily October 28, 2003)
