By Edie Lau, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Apr. 15--The number of possible cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Sacramento County has risen to three, and the county's health chief predicted the number would continue to grow.
Dr. Glennah Trochet, Sacramento County public health officer, said Monday that all three SARS instances are associated with travel to Asia.
The first case in Sacramento was identified last week; over the past weekend, physicians reported two more cases. Trochet said the three are unrelated.
'Right now we have no evidence of any spread of this disease in this community,' she said.
Nevertheless, she predicted the number of residents affected will rise to 10 or more before the international epidemic is over because 'we have a lot of travel to that area of the world.'
The respiratory syndrome first surfaced in China's Guangdong province in November. It has since appeared in other parts of Asia, in North America, Europe, South America, Africa and the Middle East. The vast majority of cases are in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Adding to the anxiety, the New York Times reported that 47 new SARS cases have been reported in the Shanxi interior province of northern China, heralding the possible spread of the disease through that country's vast, medically underserved hinterlands.
A World Health Organization tally showed 3,169 cases worldwide as of Monday. Of those, 144 people have died, and 1,499 have recovered.
In the United States, the number of cases totals 193, 41 of which are in California.
SARS is an insidious illness in that it comes on like the flu, but may rapidly deteriorate into a lethal pneumonia.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines American cases of SARS this way:
-- Illness began on or after Feb. 1; and
-- Fever is greater than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit; and
-- Patient exhibits one or more signs of respiratory illness, including coughing, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, hypoxia or radiographic findings of either pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome; and
-- Within 10 days of onset, patient traveled to China; Hanoi, Vietnam; and/or Singapore -- areas of documented or suspected community transmission of SARS; or patient had close contact within 10 days of onset with a person who traveled to a SARS area or has a suspected case of SARS.
Travel includes visiting an airport in a SARS hot spot. Close contact means having cared for, lived with or had direct contact with respiratory secretions or body fluids of a suspected SARS patient.
The cause of SARS has yet to be confirmed. The leading hypothesis is that the infection is caused by a coronavirus, which until now in humans was associated with the common cold, not killer pneumonia. The virus suspected of causing the syndrome is completely new to science.
In California, the illness has struck both genders equally, with 22 males and 19 females counted as suspect cases, according to Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services.
Brooks said the people involved range in age from 1 1/2 to 85 years, four of them children under age 10. The vast majority -- 38 -- traveled recently; the remaining three were household contacts of travelers.
In Sacramento, Trochet declined to give the age or gender of the individuals involved, saying that with such a small number of cases, it would be too easy to determine from the details the patients' identities.
She also declined to say whether any of the people were hospitalized. 'Our understanding is that all of the cases are getting better,' she said.
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(c) 2003, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
