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Kolkata reports new SARS case

Kolkata, May 4
Kolkata reported a new case of SARS on today, three days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) said the country was free of the deadly flu-like disease, a press report said.

Health officials said a 25-year-old man, who had returned from Hong Kong a week ago, was suffering from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Another state health official said a medical report on the patient, who was found coughing and with a fever at the Kolkata airport, was being sent to New Delhi and the WHO. India had reported 20 SARS cases based on laboratory tests before the WHO said on Thursday the country had no patients fitting its definition of the illness.

HYDERABAD: Twentythree Australian nationals have been kept in isolation while 55 other foreigners were screened after two Australians were admitted to the Chest Diseases Hospital here yesterday with suspected SARS.

Ninety foreigners, with a majority of them from Australia (the others are from Canada and the USA), had arrived in the city a few days ago. Most of them belong to a music troupe and are scheduled to perform at a concert in Wesley Degree College on May 31.

However, two of them, Wilcox Luke Charles and Goodall, were quarantined at the hospital here, on suspected SARS infection. ANI/UNI

Pregnant woman SARS suspect
Tribune News Service

Amritsar, May 4
Even as Mr Partap Singh Arora, a suspected SARS patient, has been discharged from the local Kakkar Hospital another suspected patient Babli (23) with four month’s pregnancy was admitted to Guru Nanak Dev Hospital here today.

The health authorities have sent her blood, stool, urine and other samples to the National Institute of Communicable Diseases. However, Dr Kanwaljit Singh, Civil Surgeon, and Dr H.S. Gill, Medical Superintendent, claimed that the patient had neither travelled to any SARS-affect country nor she had come in contact with any such patient.