A new type of atypical pneumonia dubbed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome continues to spread globally, with 1,316 cases and 48 deaths reported so far, most of them in China and Hong Kong. Despite the fact that health care professionals are practicing rigorous isolation techniques when they treat known or suspected victims, the disease is causing tens of new victims to fall gravely ill every day. It’s now clear that early guesses about the pathogen’s infectiousness were too optimistic, and that means more stringent measures to contain the outbreak are now justified.
Yesterday, doctors in Hong Kong announced that 14 people in one apartment block appear to have contracted SARS from another resident, who in turn got the disease from visiting his brother in hospital. The new victims live on different floors, meaning that they probably got the disease by inhaling small amounts of virus in airborne water droplets, perhaps left in the air by the “index patient” when he coughed in the building’s elevators or lobby.
Are you terrified yet?
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00414.html