'I never ate civet cats', says China SARS patient
The 32-year-old television producer said he did not know how he caught the pneumonia-like illness and had not been to dirty places or wildlife markets for the past two months.
The patient, identified by his surname Luo, recalled only having thrown a baby mouse out of the window.
'My colleague told the doctors about me and the mouse, hoping to help them find the source of my infection,' Luo was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.
Luo was declared fully recovered Tuesday and is expected to be discharged from hospital Thursday.
He had been officially confirmed as having Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) on Monday after being hospitalised in Guangzhou city, in southern Guangdong province, late December.
It is the first SARS case in mainland China in six-months, marking a resurfacing of the dreaded disease that caused a global crisis last year, killing about 800 people and infecting around 8,000.
The case has prompted a mass slaughter of the weasel-like civet cats in Guangdong after mainland and Hong Kong scientists found the animals, bred and sold as a culinary delicacy, had a similar virus as the SARS virus found in Luo.
Guangdong Wednesday continued its campaign to eradicate civets, confiscating the animals being farmed or sold in markets and restaurants and decimating them.
So far, 2,443 of the animals with a cat-like body have been drowned in disinfectants or liquefied in pressurized pots, the Xinkuaibao newspaper said Wednesday.
An estimated 10,000 farmed civets are to be killed by a Saturday deadline as China tries to stop a resurgence of SARS.
Overseas experts are however raising concerns about the hasty culling, saying the move was premature and potentially misguided, and may even be fingering an animal that is innocent.
Numerous other species, ranging from rats to domestic cats, can carry the SARS virus and no-one yet knows how or even if any of these species can transmit the virus to humans -- or whether these animals were infected by humans rather than the other way round, they said.
'The virus is relatively promiscuous. It can infect many different animal species, probably also including rodents, so taking all those things together, the question really is whether the culprit is indeed the civet cat,' Dutch virologist Albert Osterhaus of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam told AFP.
The World Health Organisation also accused China Wednesday of rushing into the cull.
'There's a great suspicion of a link, but there's no clear evidence, scientific proof that civet cats are spreading this disease to humans,' said Beijing-based WHO spokesman Bob Dietz.
'The whole thing is going ahead faster than it seems necessary.'
Safety measures were not taken in all cases, raising WHO fears the disease could spread to workers carrying out the slaughter.
'We saw some pictures where people weren't wearing goggles,' Dietz said.
While civets in Guangdong are being targeted, many civets sold there come from other provinces, which so far have not ordered a similar round of killing.
"N-am mai mâncat zibetã pisici", spune China SARS pacient - 'I never ate civet cats', says China SARS patient - articole medicale engleza - startsanatate