Report: SARS cases rises to 3
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WHO experts inspect the Guangdong No. 8 People's Hospital in Guangzhou.
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BEIJING, China (AP) -- Two suspected SARS patients in southern China have been confirmed to have the disease, the government said.
The latest report brings the total number of cases so far this year to three.
The two patients were a 20-year-old restaurant waitress and a 35-year-old businessman, the official Xinhua News Agency said in a brief dispatch, citing the Health Ministry.
"After strict tests by the World Health Organization laboratories, they were confirmed to be SARS cases," Xinhua said on Saturday.
The woman was discharged from the hospital on Saturday and all the people who had contact with her have been removed from medical observation without showing any symptoms, Xinhua said. The businessman was in stable condition, it said. No other details were provided.
The season's first confirmed case, a 32-year-old television producer, was released from the hospital last week after recovering from what health officials say may be a milder strain of the virus, which killed more than 700 people worldwide last year.
Saturday's announcement came one day after a WHO team returned from the southern city of Guangzhou, where they found that civet cats with the SARS virus were in the restaurant where the waitress worked, more evidence that the animals are the source of the disease.
"Not only were there civet cats there, but at some point civet cats that were carrying the SARS coronavirus," team leader Dr. Robert Breiman said at a news conference Friday, adding that experts also found "many, many cages" with the virus from samples taken at two live-animal markets.
However, the WHO still doesn't know what role the civet cats play in spreading the virus.
Earlier research that suggested a possible link between civets _ a regional delicacy -- and the first confirmed SARS case prompted large-scale culling of the animals in Guangzhou and surrounding Guangdong province.
Provincial health officials have said between January 1 and January 12, Guangdong slaughtered 3,903 civets and 665 other exotic animals. The province has also asked neighboring regions to block people from shipping civets to Guangdong and has set up checkpoints at its borders to check incoming traffic.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome emerged in November 2002 in Guangdong. The virus killed 774 people and sickened more than 8,000 people globally before subsiding in June.
This year, China's three cases have been milder, Breiman and Chinese experts said.
The patients had fevers for shorter periods and, unlike many people stricken earlier, didn't need respirators to breathe, said Wang Zhiqiong, deputy director-general of the Guangdong Public Health Department.
However, researchers haven't been able to isolate live samples of the virus this year, "so we can't say for sure how great the change is," said Dr. Xu Ruiheng, deputy director of the Guangdong Center for Disease Control.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Football Association said that SARS will not prevent the 2006 World Cup qualifying match against Kuwait from being held in Guangzhou on February 18.
"We are keeping close eyes on the situation in Guangzhou ... But the disease is not serious enough to threaten the match," CFA spokesman Dong Hua was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency. "We have not thought about relocating the match."
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