Killer disease mounts, hunt for cure on

‘‘We are too early in the epidemic. It will be foolhardy for me to say what the trends are,’’ Yeoh said when asked if patients were recovering or getting worse. Airports and airlines from Italy to New Zealand are on alert and have orders them not to check in passengers showing symptoms of the disease.

South Korea became the latest country to warn its citizens against travel to China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, where most infections have occurred. Singapore and Taiwan issued travel warnings last week.

The illness is an atypical pneumonia that begins with high fever, chills, cough and breathing difficulty and can deteriorate rapidly into pneumonia.

Some experts believe it is caused by a new virus. In Hong Kong, where one person has died, government officials said the number of people infected had nearly doubled to 95, of which 83 had developed severe pneumonia.

Some passengers arriving at Hong Kong airport were seen wearing surgical masks and bus companies told drivers to cover their noses and mouths as a precaution.

In Vietnam, where a nurse died on Saturday, the number of infections rose to 50 from 46. Some travellers have cancelled tours to Vietnam and Hong Kong, where tourism has been a bright spot for the economy.

In Canada, seven people have been infected and two have died. Scientists around the world are working to identify the disease. Some health experts suspect it may be linked to an outbreak of severe atypical pneumonia that infected 305 people in China’s southern Guangdong province in February, five of whom later died.

But WHO officials in Beijing said on Monday there was no proof that the outbreak in Guangdong was linked to the ones in Hong Kong and elsewhere. In Italy, four people who arrived on a Singapore Airlines flight were put under observation and airports in the country are on high alert, Italy’s Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia said.

The ability of the disease to spread quickly across the world was highlighted at the weekend when a Singapore doctor displayed symptoms and was taken off a plane in Frankfurt.

The doctor had earlier treated patients with the disease in Singapore, where 21 people are now infected. Most of the victims are doctors, nurses or close relatives of infected people.

The infections in Vietnam appear to have begun with an American-Chinese businessman who was hospitalised in Hanoi after arriving from Shanghai and Hong Kong with respiratory problems. He was later flown back to Hong Kong where he died.

The outbreak follows a bird-flu virus that killed a Hong Kong man and infected his son in February. The father’s illness deteriorated into pneumonia before he died. But the government says the new disease is not bird flu. (Reuters)