SARS: Canada orders hundreds into quarantine
Hundreds more people in Canada have been told to quarantine themselves at home due to possible exposure to a new cluster of SARS cases in Toronto, health officials said.
The nine probable cases and 23 suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome first identified last week put Canada’s largest city back on a World Health Organisation list of SARS-affected areas. Three more probable cases from the initial Toronto outbreak also remained in hospital.
Still reeling from the biggest SARS outbreak outside of Asia in March and April, Toronto now faces further harm to the crucial convention and tourism industry because of the renewed cases.
“We had hoped SARS was behind us but to quote our medical officials, ‘SARS is the new reality’,” Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman told a news conference yesterday.
The WHO designation is routine for places with new cases of SARS, and a spokesman for the UN health agency said Toronto was nowhere near another WHO warning against travel to the city.
Canadian health authorities scrambled to limit any further spread while investigating how the new cases slipped through monitoring and reaction systems designed to halt the spread of SARS.
In response to the new cases, health authorities re-imposed strict controls on Toronto-area hospitals – closing those where the new cases were found to new patients and limiting access to emergency rooms in all others, with staff required to wear protective masks and gowns and to take the temperature of anyone entering.
Dr Colin D’Cunha, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, said yesterday that authorities told an additional 1,200 people to quarantine themselves at home for 10 days due to possible exposure to the new SARS cluster.
The additions raised the overall quarantine figure to 3,442 and included 70 in the Muskoka-Parry Sound area, 100 miles north of the city.
Despite the spread of possible exposures, Dr D’Cunha stressed that all the known cases occurred in hospitals.
“There’s no evidence to date of community transmission,” he said.
The new cases included two deaths. A third death, that of a patient who had been sick for months, raised the overall toll in the Toronto area to 27 dead among about 150 cases.
Toronto had been removed on May 14 from the WHO list of SARS-affected areas after more than 20 days passed without a new case being reported. The new cluster is believed to come from an elderly patient whose case dates from April 19.
The 96-year-old man developed pneumonia after surgery in an orthopedic ward at North York General Hospital. He turned out to have undiagnosed SARS and infected health care workers, other patients and visitors on the ward, officials said.
A patient transferred from the orthopedic ward to St John’s Rehabilitation Hospital was considered the likely source of four more cases under investigation, they said.
The outbreak prompted the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a travel alert for Canada last week, a step short of advising against unnecessary travel there.
WHO officials stressed there were no plans to reinstate a travel advisory for Toronto. That requires specific criteria such as proven export of the illness. The agency imposed a travel advisory on Toronto on April 23 but lifted it a week later when Canada promised to upgrade monitoring of international travellers.
