China to kill rats, civet cats amid SARS fears

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, January 05, 2004

China to kill rats, civet cats amid SARS fears

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In a campaign to stop another SARS outbreak, China will kill 10 thousand civet cats and try to wipe out rats and cockroaches as fears of new cases of the flu-like disease spread in the Guangdong province and to the Philippines.

Southern China's Guangdong province, which is monitoring its first suspected SARS patient in months, planned to kill about 10,000 civets and close wild-animal markets to eliminate a possible source of the disease, state media said.

"We will start a health campaign to kill rats and cockroaches in order to give every place a thorough cleaning for the Lunar New Year," Guangdong health bureau official Feng Liuxiang was quoted by state media as saying. Chinese New Year begins on January 22.

"And we will kill all the civet cats in Guangdong free markets, which number about 10,000," he said.

SARS was first found in Guangdong in November 2002 and went on to kill 800 people around the world, including about 350 in China.

In the Philippines, a woman suspected of contracting SARS while working in Hong Kong has been isolated, but health officials said on Monday it was too early to confirm if she had the virus.

A spokesman for the center for diseases control in Guangdong said a virus gene sample from a suspected SARS patient in the province resembled that of a coronavirus found in civet cats which are a delicacy in southern China.

"We should begin the measures to prevent SARS beforehand and ban sales and eating of the animal in a bid to reduce the chance of contracting SARS virus," the spokesman said.

DIAGNOSIS PENDING

A 32-year-old television producer suspected of having SARS was admitted to hospital in Guangzhou in December but laboratory tests have been inconclusive.

The World Health Organization said on Monday it expected Hong Kong laboratories to hand over their findings on the case on Monday or Tuesday.

Media reports also have speculated the man might have caught the virus from rats but that has not been confirmed.

Hong Kong newspaper said a waitress had become the second suspected SARS case in Guangdong but provincial officials and hospitals denied the report.

The Hong Kong Standard said the waitress, in her early 20s, developed a fever a week ago and was being kept in isolation at the Guangzhou No. 1 People's Hospital. Citing unidentified reports from Guangzhou, it said the woman had symptoms of the flu-like illness but an announcement would not be made unless test results confirmed the disease.

"We do have a fever patient due to pneumonia, but this has no direct connection with any suspected SARS case," Wang Ming, deputy director of Guangzhou City diseases prevention and control center, told a news conference.

The No. 1 Guangdong People's Hospital told reporters: "We don't have a suspected SARS patient because we are not a first-line SARS hospital."

Source: agencies

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