GLOBE EDITORIAL
Staving off SARSTHE WORLDWIDE outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in late 2002 and 2003 killed 774 people, most of them in Hong Kong and mainland China, and damaged several Asian economies. In recent weeks China has reported several new cases, most of them traceable to a 26-year-old medical student who became sick in March while working in a SARS lab at China's Institute of Virology in Beijing. Another graduate student at the same lab became infected April 17. Chinese authorities should work closely with World Health Organization officials to determine how the infections occurred and how lab procedures in China and elsewhere should be changed to prevent this.
The case of the 26-year-old has officials particularly concerned because she made three train trips while infected. Her mother died, apparently of SARS, and a nurse who treated her became ill. Three relatives of the nurse and another person with whom she had contact in a Beijing hospital have also been infected. All of this comes just as China is about to celebrate a weeklong May Day holiday during which there will be greater than usual use of public transportation. Officials have already quarantined almost 500 people with links to the infected patients. There is no evidence yet that China has hushed up cases of the disease, as it did in late 2002. Still, WHO officials are right to be concerned about Chinese laboratory procedures and in particular why there was not closer monitoring of the first student to fall ill. The Beijing lab is not the only facility where SARS researchers have been infected since the first outbreak subsided last July. Laboratories working on the virus in both Taiwan and Singapore reported infections, neither of them fatal, late last year. In addition, there have been four nonlab cases of the disease in the Chinese province of Guangdong, which is believed to be where the disease originated in 2002. The four laboratory-acquired cases are strong evidence that researchers must take extraordinary precautions in dealing with virus samples. Beyond that, officials should investigate why the infected lab workers in Beijing did not immediately report to their superiors that they had fevers. Officials should also explore why the infected patients were not more quickly identified as suspected SARS cases and isolated.
Research on treatments, vaccines, and improved diagnostic tests of SARS is crucial to keeping the disease at bay. But institutes like Beijing's owe it to both their own workers and the population at large that the most stringent biosafety standards are maintained in the laboratory and that all lab workers strictly adhere to reporting requirements if they become ill. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
|
