Air passengers warned to be alert for deadly virus

Airline travellers were warned yesterday to be vigilant against a mysterious respiratory disease that has been described as a worldwide threat to health.

The infection is spread by airline passengers and begins with flu-like symptoms that quickly develop into severe pneumonia. In the past month it has killed at least nine people and infected more than a hundred others. Many were airline travellers or health professionals who had treated patients with pneumonia.

Most of the cases have been in the Far East, notably China, Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong, and are thought to be caused by the same infection responsible for an outbreak in November. That bout of pneumonia, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, killed five people and affected 305 others.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the disease, called severe acute respiratory syndrome, could spread rapidly from one country to another via airline travellers.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said today that UN health officials feared the illness could become as "deadly as the 1918 influenza" pandemic — which killed at least 20 million people.

"I understand at the WHO level there is a fear that this could potentially be as deadly as the 1918 influenza epidemic," Ms Clark said. "If that is the conclusion it will probably lead to the WHO declaring it to be a pandemic," she told reporters at a news conference.

In Germany yesterday, doctors were treating the first cases in Europe, a Singaporean physician, aged 32, and his mother-in-law who arrived in Frankfurt on a Singapore Airlines flight from New York.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, said: "This syndrome is now a worldwide health threat. The world needs to work together to find its cause, cure the sick and stop its spread."

The virus responsible for the disease causes a high fever accompanied by various respiratory symptoms including coughing and breathing difficulties. People at highest risk were those who had been in close contact with someone with severe pneumonia or who had recently travelled to countries affected by the disease, a spokesman for the WHO said. "People are not responding to antibiotics or antivirals. It's a highly contagious disease and it's moving around by jet. It's bad," he added.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said anyone returning from the affected countries with a fever and symptoms of respiratory illness should seek medical advice. But the Government was not advising people against travel, she said. "As there is no diagnosis, it is difficult to establish how serious the illness can be, but pneu-monia is a serious condition, particularly for those who are already sick or elderly."

Experts said the new virus was unlikely to be part of a bioterrorist attack. However, Julie Gerberding, of the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, said: "We have an open mind and will be keeping an open mind as we go forward."

The WHO said the outbreak of severe pneumonia in Hong Kong did not appear to have any links with the recent "bird flu" outbreak.