Toronto may raise its number of probable SARS cases from just 12 to 60 or 70, as it reclassifies how it counts suspect cases in line with World Health Organisation recommendations, one of the doctors leading the fight against the respiratory disease said yesterday.
"We're talking numbers up in the 60s, 70s," Dr Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said.
Toronto has reported just 12 probable cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, some of them old cases and some part of a new cluster that emerged last week.
It was also examining more than 50 suspect cases.
However, under a WHO definition, Toronto will now include patients with pneumonia where the cause cannot be adequately explained.
The previous Health Canada recommendation on how to define SARS included only patients with a worsening respiratory disease.
"Health Canada's definition is fine when you are looking back at an outbreak, but when you are in the middle of an outbreak, the WHO definition is more practical," Dr Low said.
Early yesterday, the Canadian authorities announced that since the renewed outbreak of SARS, two more people had died of the syndrome.
But Taiwan brushed off a sharp rise of 50 new cases yesterday.
Officials quickly insisted that the figure did not conflict with a WHO assessment that the island's epidemic was in decline.
Taiwan's Centre for Disease Control (CDC) said 10 of the new infections had been recently reported, while 40 had arisen from the reclassification of cases previously listed as "suspected".
"Today's figures did not reflect the ongoing SARS situation here. They were simply the result of an adjustment of the old cases," a CDC official said.
"Therefore, they do not conflict with the WHO evaluation of the domestic SARS situation."
The WHO said in an update on Wednesday that the disease now appeared to be in retreat in Taiwan, which has registered 81 fatalities from 660 infections of SARS.
"The rapid growth in reported cases, partly caused by the clearing of hundreds of cases in the backlog, has now slowed," the WHO said.
"With the backlog of pending cases now cleared, the low number of genuine new cases . . . indicate that the outbreak in Taiwan has begun to decline."
More than 750 people have died and more than 8,000 have been infected with SARS worldwide since the disease first emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in November last year.
Asia has been by far the worst-affected continent, with the region accounting for more than 700 fatalities and 7,000 infections among the global toll. - (Reuters/AFP)