Singapore - Airlines took precautions and health officials called for calm on Monday amid growing concern over a fast-spreading, mysterious form of pneumonia linked to nine deaths and about 500 infections worldwide.
In less than a week, the disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), has left four people dead in Asia and Canada and infected close to 200 victims, mostly medical workers and relatives in contact with patients.
Experts are racing against time to trace the cause of SARS and establish whether the new cases are related to an outbreak of an illness last month in southern China's Guangdong province which left five dead out of more than 300 cases reported.
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The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned of a global health threat with SARS cases already identified in Europe and North America.
| 'This is time for calm and not panic' |
As the number of cases in Hong Kong nearly doubled to 83, with another 12 under observation, Malaysia joined Singapore and Taiwan in warning citizens against unnecessary travel to affected areas.
Hong Kong Health Secretary Yeoh Eng-kiong admitted that the numbers were alarming but stressed that "this is time for calm and not panic."
Passengers flying into Singapore from Hong Kong, Hanoi and Guangdong are being given travel advisories explaining the symptoms of SARS and advising anyone who develops them to seek medical attention immediately.
The WHO, acting on a Chinese request, will dispatch a team of experts to China to "find the cause of the Guangdong pneumonia" and see if it is linked to the other outbreaks, Alan Schnur, head of WHO's communicable disease control team, said in Beijing.
Singapore has confined 21 victims so far, two of them in serious condition, but the government warned against over-reaction.
| 'At the moment I don't think there's any need for anybody to go around wearing masks' |
"At the moment I don't think there's any need for anybody to go around wearing masks," said Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, head of a SARS task force.
In Hanoi, the first signs of panic appeared, with some expatriate families choosing to keep children at home and others considering leaving the country.
The disease is also described as "atypical pneumonia" because it does not show the classic signs of the disease.
The Geneva-based WHO issued an emergency travel advisory over the weekend urging airlines to pinpoint passengers or crew suffering from a fever higher than 38°C, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.
They were told to watch out particularly for people who have had close contact with SARS victims, or travelled recently to affected areas.
Hong Kong-based carrier Cathay Pacific said in a press statement that it had initiated "precautionary health measures."
Its principal medical officer Dr John Merritt reminded all port managers to refrain from checking in any passenger who shows symptoms of the illness.
Merritt said air filters in planes "remove many of the droplets and particles that are responsible for spreading infection" but added that "it is important for passengers who appear to be ill to be denied boarding and referred for medical assessment".
On the ground, victims and their families waited for some headway against the baffling killer.
Anxious relatives waited on Monday outside Singapore's Communicable Disease Centre (CDC), where victims have been isolated for treatment and observation.
"It is very alarming to me and my family," the husband of a Filipino nurse confined at the CDC said.
Five of the 21 cases in Singapore involved Filipina nurses who attended to the patients.
The husband, himself a hospital worker, said his wife was admitted Sunday night after she and a colleague showed symptoms.
Since last Thursday, when an American businessman who had fallen ill in Hanoi died in Hong Kong, eight cases have been reported in Canada, where two members of a Toronto family who visited Hong Kong have died and four others fell ill.
German health authorities placed a Singaporean doctor who had treated SARS victims in medical isolation, along with wife and mother-in-law, after they flew into Frankfurt from New York over the weekend.
A total of 48 cases have been diagnosed in the Vietnamese capital, where a nurse at the Hanoi French Hospital died on Saturday from the illness. - Sapa-AFP
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