Beijing is creating a contingency plan to restrict the possible
resurgence of the SARS virus during winter, the city's senior
health official said on Friday.
Deng Xiaohong, the vice-director of the Beijing Health Bureau, said
the emergency blueprint is also designed to deal with other
possible emergencies like mass poisonings.
The plan, expected to be completed in the third quarter of the
year, will include the establishment of an emergency headquarters,
a citywide information system and a public health prevention
system.
Deng said it is not known whether SARS is a seasonal disease as it
is not fully understood at this stage.
She said the health authority will be very cautious and spare no
effort to strengthen preventative work against the virus.
She also predicted that the travel advisory imposed by the World
Health Organization (WHO) against Beijing could be lifted in about
a week as the city is moving forward rapidly to meet the
requirements for the removal of the ban.
"There are 134 SARS patients in the hospital now, all of them have
stayed there for more than 20 days. Except for seven cases, which
are critical, most of them have moved in to the recovery period,''
Deng said.
According to Deng, many of the patients are expected to be out of
hospital in a week, meeting requirements for the removal of the ban
-- fewer than 60 hospitalized SARS patients.
Robert Bietz, the spokesman for the WHO's China office, said the
command to remove the travel advisory should be released by Gro
Harlem Brundtland, the director-general of WHO. Bietz said he has
not got any sign from Geneva yet that the ban will be lifted.
There were no new or suspected SARS cases reported on the Chinese
mainland on Friday and Beijing has not reported a single case of
the disease for nine consecutive days, as of Friday.
If
Beijing wants to get off the WHO's list, it has to have no reports
of the virus for 20 consecutive days, Deng said.
The last 18 recovered SARS patients in Beijing's Xiaotangshan
Hospital were discharged on Friday.
As
the country's largest SARS designated facility, the hospital was
home to 680 patients during the 51 day-period beginning on April
30, when the virus was peaking.
Eight of the patients died, resulting in a mortality rate of less
than 1.2 percent. There has been no report of infection among the
hospital's 1,318 medical staff.
When talking about the misdiagnosis of cases, Deng admitted that
there was a possibility that number of patients had been
over-estimated, which can be attributed to the lack of a rapid
diagnosis system at the early stage of SARS.
(China Daily June 21, 2003)
