Via the Guardian Unlimited: China tries to calm fears over virus outbreak. This is of interest because it shows how China is detecting and responding to unexpected diseases. Excerpt:
The Chinese government has dispatched medical experts to eastern Anhui province in a bid to curb a rapidly spreading outbreak of an intestinal virus that has killed at least 20 children.
But officials sought to calm fears amid reports that almost 1,900 children have been taken ill with enterovirus 71, or EV71, which can cause hand, foot and mouth disease.
Newspapers have published scathing criticism of local officials, attacking them for waiting weeks to raise the alarm, and even calling for them to be sacked.
The issue is particularly sensitive because of the uproar caused by the authorities' handling of the Sars epidemic of 2003. Then, they sacked the health minister and pledged to construct an "open and transparent" reporting scheme after it emerged that they had not told the World Health Organisation (WHO) of the outbreak until news emerged independently.
Today central government officials said the outbreak could not be compared to Sars and added that it had taken time to discover the cause of the outbreak.
"You can't talk about EV71 and Sars in the same breath. Sars was a new infectious disease, and anyone could be infected. Sars was also very deadly," Yang Weizhong, deputy chief of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a webcast.
"In the initial stages of [this] probe a lot of effort was expended, to rule out some serious infectious diseases like Sars, bird flu and meningitis," he added.
The first cases of EV71 emerged in Fuyang city in early March, but the outbreak was only reported on Sunday - 40 days later. Since then, the number of recorded infections has soared, with hundreds more emerging daily and reports of cases in neighbouring Henan province.
