SARS update
According to WHO statistics compiled on Mar 31, 17:00 GMT+2, four more people have died of SARS since Saturday, bringing total number of deaths worldwide to 58. Of the four, three were from Hong Kong; the fourth was from Canada.
1,622 cases of SARS have been detected so far. The largest number have occurred in China (806 cases) and Hong Kong (530 cases).
The US and Canada are not spared; there are 59 suspect cases under investigation in the US and 44 in Canada.
In Singapore, SARS has claimed four lives, the latest being a woman who died yesterday. One newspaper reported, The woman had travelled to Sarawak [East Malaysia] with her family on March 15 and had developed a fever after returning on March 18.
That's very worrying, because if she contracted it in Malaysia...
So far 29 suspected cases of SARS have been recorded in Malaysia, all of which have turned out negative.
However, on Sunday, a woman who was under quarantine for suspected SARS died in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital. Reporters were informed that heart failure, not SARS, was the cause of death. What's scary is a tiny sentence in the report:
Health authorities declined to confirm whether SARS cases had been reported here, but did disclose that the World Health Organisation was co-operating with the Malaysian Government.
As fellow Malaysian blogger Jeff Ooi asks,
Our government does tend to take a rather protective stand with regards to its citizens (witness the banning of the movie Daredevil). So it's entirely possible that they may not be letting us see the whole picture.