China in race to slaughter civets
SARS-wary southern China today threatened fines of up to €9,350 for merchants who try to hide civet cats, a day ahead of the deadline to slaughter thousands of the animals because of fears they carry the disease.
Guangdong province, which announced a second suspected SARS case yesterday, intensified its campaign to clean streets and wipe out civets plus other potential carriers that have been labelled the “four dangers” – rats, roaches, flies and mosquitoes.
Civets, a local delicacy, were ordered seized from markets and slaughtered after tests suggested a link between them and China’s first SARS case of the season, a 32-year-old television producer.
A five-member World Health Organisation team was in Guangzhou today to help Chinese experts try to figure out how the man was exposed to the virus.
WHO officials have urged caution with the civet slaughter, saying it could destroy medical clues or expose those involved in the cull to SARS.
The WHO experts have not joined the investigation into the second suspected case, team spokesman Roy Wadia said, but added that experts from the two sides were meeting today to work out how to proceed.
Health workers have been drowning, electrocuting and incinerating civet cats by the thousands.
The order to kill civets set a deadline of tomorrow and later was expanded to include badgers, racoon dogs and some other wildlife eaten in Guangzhou.
After tomorrow, “any business person caught hiding civets will be fined between 10,000 and 100,000 yuan (€945-€9,450),” said the newspaper Guangzhou Daily. It said authorities would carry out a “carpet-style investigation” to root out hidden animals.
Last year, Guangdong was labelled the birthplace of severe acute respiratory syndrome. The disease killed 58 people in the province and spread worldwide, claiming 774 lives before subsiding in July.
The 20-year-old waitress who on Thursday was declared China’s second suspected SARS case was isolated in the Guangzhou No. 8 People’s Hospital and her status was unchanged, said a spokesman for the provincial health bureau.
The announcement of her case came just as China’s first SARS case, the television producer, left the same Guangzhou hospital after recovering.
