Sars virus returns to China

A Corona virus is thought a cause Sars

China has confirmed two people have been diagnosed with the Sars virus.

The country's Ministry of Health also said a woman suspected of having the disease had died earlier this month.

The dead woman was the mother of one of those confirmed as being infected. A second suspected case has also been reported.

It is thought that the cases can be traced back to the Center for Disease Control in Beijing, where one of the confirmed cases worked.

Experts have reached the tentative conclusion that this outbreak can be traced back to infection by laboratory workers Chinese Ministry of Health statement

Sars first emerged in the southern province of Guangdong late in 2002. Eight thousand people were infected in the outbreak, and 800 died.

China has announced it was on an emergency footing against the disease and said anyone found with a fever at the border would be quarantined.

Fever

In a statement released on Friday, the Ministry of Health said: "Experts have reached the tentative conclusion that this outbreak can be traced back to infection by laboratory workers."

It added that one of the confirmed cases, a 26-year-old medical student identified by her surname Song, conducted research at the laboratory for two weeks last month.

She later returned to her home in the Anhui province, eastern China, where she was hospitalised with a fever.

The woman was cared for by her mother who died earlier this week. Post-mortem tests have not yet established for certain whether she died from Sars.

The second confirmed case, a 20-year-old Beijing nurse Li Na, worked in the respiratory department of Jiangong hospital, where Song had been briefly care for before going home to Anhui.

A hospital official said all colleagues who had contact with her had been quarantined.

The second suspected Sars case also had ties to the Center for Disease Control.

The patient, a 31-year-old researcher, had worked at the centre's laboratory.

Authorities have tried to contain the outbreak by placing over 100 people who had been in contact with the Anhui cases under observation.

In Beijing, 188 people were deemed to have been in close contact with the 20-year-old nurse. Five have developed fever and other Sars symptoms, the health ministry said.

Reappearance

China also confirmed four cases of Sars in Guangdong earlier this year, all of whom recovered.

Scientists have always predicted that Sars would reappear - but they say the number of cases was unlikely to reach the scale of the 2002 to 2003 outbreak.

They said this was most likely to happen during the flu season.

The best way to contain the spread of Sars is to isolate people with the virus and those who have come into contact with them.

A failure to do this during the outbreak was blamed for the spread of cases across the world.

The virus is believed to have originated in China's southern Guangdong province in November 2002, and spread around the world by air travellers in February.