The World Health Organisation (WHO) today accepted a leading British scientist's findings that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which is causing panic worldwide, is more deadly than first thought.
Professor Roy Anderson, of Imperial College London, said he had found that the pneumonia-like virus killed ten per cent of those infected, while the WHO had previously reported that the disease was thought to kill between five and six per cent of those who contracted it.
Prof Anderson, a leading authority on infectious diseases, said he had conducted a more in-depth analysis on latest WHO figures. His results will be published in full next week in a medical journal.
Mr Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the WHO's communicable disease section, said: "We have not seen the report so we could not comment except to say that this is a top class professional and any figure he commits himself to is likely to be as close as possible to accurate."
Prof Anderson's study, based on about 1,400 cases that have occurred in Hong Kong, is also expected to report that SARS remained infectious much longer than other viruses.
However, he insisted today some of the "doom and gloom predictions" about the spread of the disease had been exaggerated. This is not a highly transmissible infection, he said. It has been effectively contained in most of the developed countries in the world with a very limited number of cases.
SARS has now killed at least 293 people worldwide, out of more than 4,600 infected.