CANADA: Canadian health officials, once hopeful they could quickly contain the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), are increasingly pessimistic as the numbers of Canadians struck by the disease continues to rise.
Outside Asia, where SARS originated, Canada has been the country which has been worst hit by the atypical and deadly strain of pneumonia.
As of Friday, 14 people had died, and there were 304 people feared to be suffering from the disease, 249 of them in the province of Ontario. While a drop of two cases from the previous count of 306 provided some sense that a corner had been turned in containing the disease, behind the figures a number of worrying uncertainties remain.
Until this week, health officials had been able to trace virtually all the SARS cases in Canada back to one elderly woman who had infected some of those close to her after she contracted the disease on a trip to Hong Kong.
In turn, those she infected passed the disease on to patients and staff at two Toronto hospitals. By closing the hospitals and putting thousands of people into quarantine, doctors believed they had contained the epidemic, but on Tuesday came the first bad news: the appearance of 29 unrelated cases among the 500 members of a Filipino Catholic prayer group in Toronto, all of whom remain in quarantine.
Then a group of 450 financial advisers were put under preventative quarantine after participating in a conference also attended by a member of the Filipino prayer group.
The conference took place in Montreal, the capital of Quebec province, which until now has been untouched by the spread of SARS.
On Saturday, health officials partially closed two other hospitals, one in Toronto, and one in Vancouver, British Columbia, after new suspected cases of the disease appeared among staff.
But perhaps most worrying was the case of a resident of a 19-story apartment block in Toronto who contracted SARS without coming into direct contact with three fellow residents from the Filipino prayer group.
Health officials fear the infection may have been passed via a lift button or handrail on a stairway in the building.
In addition, the disease, 11 out of 14 of whose victims have been elderly, appears to have begun striking young people too.
"We are seeing that here in Toronto . . . younger people seemingly healthy are getting critically ill," said Mr Andrew Simor, head of microbiology at the Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre.
Some of the prayer group members exposed to the virus were young adults now in a critical condition, he added.
Much hope was being placed in the quick discovery of a vaccine, but comments by a Canadian health ministry spokesman threw a damper on any such optimism. -
In Toronto, where SARS is hitting the local economy hard, authorities will meet on Tuesday to discuss possible new containment measures.