There is only a remote chance a Filipino woman suspected of contracting SARS actually has the disease, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday, as Philippine officials said she seemed to be recovering.
The government has ordered 38 people to stay at home after they had contact with the 42-year-old woman, who returned to the Philippines on December 20 from Hong Kong where she worked as a maid.
The woman, who is being treated for atypical pneumonia, is in isolation along with her husband.
"It could be a very remote possibility that it is a SARS case," Jean-Marc Olive, the WHO representative in the Philippines, told reporters. "Personally, I don't think so." Mr Olive said the only reason to suspect the woman might have the flu-like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome was that she travelled from "a possible area where SARS could re-emerge".
Hong Kong was hard-hit by a SARS outbreak last year when it swept out of southern China and was spread by travellers, killing 800 people around the world.
Philippine authorities will have to wait until today for tests to confirm whether the woman has SARS, but Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit said her condition was improving.
"She has no more fever, a significant sign that she is on the road to recovery," Mr Dayrit told reporters.
Thirty-four people who had contact with the woman at a government-run hospital in Laguna province, south of Manila, have been placed in home quarantine, including two doctors who initially treated her.
Four residents of her village have also been isolated and local authorities closed an elementary school.
Villagers were advised to avoid unnecessary travel.
Meanwhile, China has given a Saturday deadline for the slaughter of civet cats as it tries to avert a SARS outbreak, but World Health Organisation experts said the cull itself could pose a health hazard.
China on Monday confirmed its first SARS case since a world epidemic was declared over in July, and began culling civet cats, a local delicacy, on fears a new strain of the deadly virus may have jumped from the animals to humans.
Health officials in the southern province of Guangdong said a virus gene sample from the new SARS patient - a 32-year-old television producer - resembled that of a coronavirus found in civet cats.
To eliminate a possible fresh source of the disease, the province where Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome originated in November 2002 ordered wild animal markets immediately closed.
"The provincial government of Guangdong ordered the immediate shutdown of local wild animal markets and the killing of all civet cats before January 10 in an urgent measure to contain a possible outbreak of SARS," Xinhua news agency said. - (Reuters)