Recent observations and experimental evidence have purported that a virus causes SARS, but such viruses have been isolated in only less than half of SARS patients in some studies and virologist Vincent Plummer of Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory found that indeed 1 in 5 perfectly healthy Canadians with a history of recent travel to Asia had the virus. Therefore SARS microbiologic ori...

OBJECTIVE To describe the case fatality rate of SARS in Beijing. METHODS Data of SARS cases notified from Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (BCDC) and supplemented by other channels were collected. The data were analyzed by rate calculation. RESULTS The case fatality rate of SARS in Beijing was 7.66%, and had an ascending trend while the age of cases was getting older, and a...

The SARS outbreak in 2003 pushed Toronto’s health care system to its limits. Staffing shortages, transmission of SARS within the ICU, and the influx of critically ill SARS patients were some unique challenges to the delivery of critical care. Communication strategies were a key component in the critical care response to SARS. Regular teleconference calls, web-based training and education, and t...

AFTER WORLDWIDE EFFORT, THE GLOBAL outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (1) were contained in July. However, a recent case discovered in Singapore has generated additional concerns that SARS may resurface. SARS-related efforts have largely centered on crisis control. There is also a fundamental need to develop long-term strategies that can help prevent outbreaks of infectious d...

This paper presents an intelligent SARS diffusion simulation method using Agent technology in Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) based on current results of SARS research. VGE is the 3D carrier space of SARS diffusion, and Agent technology is used to describe the diffusion process. Meanwhile, a SARS diffusion model is designed and an intelligent simulation method is proposed. Preliminary resu...

A real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay was developed to rapidly detect the severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). The assay, based on multiple primer and probe sets located in different regions of the SARS-CoV genome, could discriminate SARS-CoV from other human and animal coronaviruses with a potential detection limit of <10 gen...

Developing effective and safe vaccines is urgently needed to prevent infection by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). The inactivated SARS-CoV vaccine may be the first one available for clinical use because it is easy to generate; however, safety is the main concern. The spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV is the major inducer of neutralizing antibodies, and th...

A large number of SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV) have been detected in horseshoe bats since 2005 in different areas of China. However, these bat SARSr-CoVs show sequence differences from SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in different genes (S, ORF8, ORF3, etc) and are considered unlikely to represent the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV. Herein, we report the findings of our 5-year surveillance ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the epidemiologic features of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Beijing. METHOD Database of the 2 521 probable cases of SARS in Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control was used. RESULTS The course of SARS epidemic in Beijing could be divided into five phases: import and spreading-from 1 to 31 in March, rising-from April 1 to April 15, peak-from Apri...

The prompt identification of a novel human coronavirus as the etiologic agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the following characterization of its genomic sequence demonstrated the power deriving from coordinate integration of clinical investigation, molecular virology studies and genomic sequencing efforts. The foresight in saving specimens of both human and animal origin from...