April 8th, 2003:
Less Than 6 Weeks After the Outbreak of SARS in China and South East Asia

© Copyright 2003 by Foreign Correspondent Tat Chee Tam, T.C.M., Hong Kong, China
(Explore Issue: Volume 12, Number 4)

Currently, there is an outbreak of atypical pneumonia (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS) hitting countries in South East Asia especially hard, such as Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. Some travelers in these regions have been infected with the corona-virus. The clinical symptoms are high fever, cough, chills, diarrhea, myalgia and shortness of breath.

The first case of SARS was detected in the GuangDong province of China back in November, 2002. It was later confirmed that the patient was infected by transmission from a raccoon type of animal to a human. A medical professor from Guangzhou, during his visit in February 2003, supposedly was the major cause of spreading the disease in Hong Kong.

On March 4th, 2003, a 26-year-old male walked into the Prince of Wales Hospital emergency clinic of Hong Kong, and reported that he’d had a fever for a few days with non-stop cough. The hospital diagnosed him with pneumonia, and he was admitted to ward 8A, a medical students’ training ward. The young man looked healthy in general, so the hospital treated him with anti-biotics and assumed that he would recover in 2 to 3 days. But 6 days later, nurses reported 17 more cases of infection, out of the 40 patients in the same ward. A cardiologist was one of the infected patients. Doctors still didn’t know that an epidemic disease called SARS had arrived, without any special signs as warnings.