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Mystery Pneumonia Kills Elderly Man in Hong Kong
Hong Kong: An elderly man has died in a Hong Kong hospital from Sars, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The death of the man in his 70s brings the global death toll to 11. He had also been suffering from a blood disease. As he died, the number of patients in Hong Kong diagnosed with Sars rose by 19 to 222. A Hong Kong university team has isolated the virus from the lung tissue of a patient who developed Sars after contact with a doctor from southern China�s Guangdong Province. The World Health Organisation, which has issued a rare global warning about the disease, says the laboratory has succeeded in culturing an infectious agent that might be the cause of SARS.It describes the culture as: �The first important step towards the development of a diagnostic test.� A team of WHO infectious disease experts is travelling to China to investigate whether an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in China�s Guangdong Province last month was linked to Sars.In Singapore, a hospital has been closed to all but Sars patients and the US State Department has warned Americans to avoid Vietnam because of the disease.
Source: The Southeast Asian Times.